Tag: ride right through them

Last week I mentioned how the Chris Christie Bridge scandal was a golden opportunity for the GOP:

they should use every moment on the air to compare and contrast the media reaction to this Christie Scandal to the IRS scandal.

How horrible that in view of the ongoing IRS scandal where a government agency was used to go after conservatives that such a thing would happen.

They should wonder aloud if any of Chris Christie’s aides will plead the 5th under oath like the IRS people did.

They should talk about how Chris Christie should not stonewall or put up roadblocks as the Obama administration has continued to do with the IRS scandal.

And they should of course talk about the contrast between the media interest, saying perhaps Christie might use the Obama strategy on the IRS scandal, deny and stonewall in the hope that the media will ignore it over time.

They should POUND this there should be no answer that comes out of their lips that doesn’t use the words “IRS Scandal” and “Bridge Scandal” in the same sentence. Every article written on it by any conservative source should mention it, contrast it play on the difference in media interest between the pair.

Let’s start with Rudy Giuliani on This Week he starts the comparisons with the very first question from Martha Raddatz:

Giuliani: You know, Martha, that’s always kind of simplistic after some like this happens, you know, how could it happen, how could you not have known? How did President Obama not know about the IRS targeting right wing groups? You know, massive numbers of right wing groups…

Raddatz interrupts almost at once with saying…

But this is traffic, this affects everybody. This seems very different.

Because the IRS certainly isn’t something that affects everybody but Rudy was just getting started

Giuliani:Well, that affects a lot of people. And the reality is, things go wrong in an administration. And frankly, you know, he was in campaign-mode at the time, during campaign-mode you miss a lot of things. You’re not paying as much attention. We see that with Benghazi.

I’ll give you plenty of examples. Every administration, every president, every mayor, every governor, something goes wrong below them and then the press ask, gosh, how do they not know? How did they not realize?

Note how Rudy leads with “every president” and keeps going back there all through the interview

Giuliani:But this is what happens in political operations. I mean, people get wrong messages. It happens all the time. It happened, again, I go back to the IRS scandal. The people in the IRS though President Obama wanted them to do this. President Obama didn’t want them to do this. But they got the sense because of that culture that they were supposed to target right wing groups. It was totally wrong.

I think it was totally wrong for these people to have interpreted Chris Christie this way.

But, look, he’s handled it the best way you can possibly handle it. He’s held a press conference, he’s flatly denied it.

There a reason why Morning Joe took a swing at him today and when GOP chairman Renice Priebus said this on Meet the Press:

He stood there for 111 minutes, in an open dialogue with the press. Now only if Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton would give us 111 seconds of that would we find out some things we want to find out about Obamacare, Benghazi, the I.R.S.. I mean Chris Christie’s– (Gregory Interrupts) –been (CHUCKLE) totally open here.

David Gregory went on full defense mode defending the president emphatically

Let me pick up on that point, Chairman. So you had said about the president and the I.R.S. scandal, and there’s been no direct tie, of course, to what happened to the I.R.S. to the president, just as there has not been a direct tie to Governor Christie here.

and then when Chairman Priebus he again made the contrast

No. He– no, he– no. The– here’s the– he trusted people that lied to him, and he fired those people. The president doubles down on Eric Holder. He doubles down on Hillary Clinton and Lois Lerner and Susan Rice. It’s the opposite–

Gregory interrupts, asked a new question about tone and then kept interrupting as Priebus made his point.

Because Chris Christie– here’s why. Because Chris Christie gave us almost two hours of open dialogue and open– (Gregory interrupts)–examination with the press. Because you can judge a person. You can judge a person’s character. We had an opportunity to do that. And so that’s what Chris Christie offered, not only to the people of New Jersey, but the people across the country. The president never offered– (Gregory interrupts)–that open dialogue so that people–(Gregory interrupts)–character–(Gregory interrupts)–of the president.

Even Rand Paul a Christie rival for 2016 gets it. He is interviewed and goes after Christie and is uninterrupted by his media until he gets over the target:

Sen Rand Paul: Nobody wants the power of government to be used against somebody just cause you lost. A good example of this is the IRS scandal President Obama used the IRS or is alleged to have used the IRS to go after conservative groups and tea party groups…

Interviewer: (Loudly) “And Progressives”

I don’t like autoplay in video but go to the AZcentral site and listen to the tone when the interview interrupts. God forbid any person who hears that interview understand that the IRS targeted conservatives and tea party members. There is a reason why every time I bring the subject in comparison I’m challenged by the left and also a reason why Tax Prof Blog’s update today on the IRS scandal day 249 is as Glenn Reynolds put it a big one.

I have absolutely no idea if Chris Christie had direct involvement in the bridge stuff, but I do know this. The MSM is going to be pretty careful about who they bring on to talk about it.

I think the Left is scared of that connection, let’s keep them that way.

It’s Monday, and we have so far moved the ball only $22 dollars toward a full paycheck.

While part of that is a new subscriber which moves us closer to our goals in a permanent way one new subscriber still doesn’t do the trick to permanently secure the mortgage and pay DaMagnificent Seven plus our new villager.

But lets focus on the positive with 13 tip jar hits of $25 we will get our first full paycheck of 2014.

Once we manage that then we’ll worry about catching up on the ground we’re behind.

That new subscriber means we’re now only 57 1/4 more subscribers @ at $20 a month the bills will be paid every week and the problem will be solved on a more permanent basis. It won’t cover CPAC but it will do all the base bills and that’s what counts

There have already been minor signs that the left is not hopeful for the 2014 midterm elections but yesterday the democrats and the administration gave a giant sign that they see disaster ahead:

Businesses won’t be penalized next year if they fail to provide workers health insurance after the Obama administration decided to delay a key requirement under its signature 2010 health-care law.

The government will postpone enforcement of the so-called employer mandate until 2015, the administration said today. Under the provision, companies with 50 or more workers face a fine of as much as $3,000 per employee if they don’t offer affordable insurance.

With Barack Obama no longer on the ballot there is no incentive for black America to turn out to prevent him from being considered a one term failure (Which was apparently more important to Black America than actually having a failed president for four more years and living with the consequences).

This makes it imperative that the low information voters who still haven’t figured out what Obamacare is going to do to them, don’t see what coming, at least not during this election cycle anyway.

But you don’t want people to know you’ve delayed it. After all some democrats are still touting Obamacare and Democrats operatives still insist Obamacare will create jobs, become popular, clear your acne, get you laid and make the need for Viagra totally unnecessary. How do you delay it without the public noticing?

The answer is this you leak out the news two days before the fourth of July while congress is out-of-town, the President is in Africa, George Zimmerman is on trial, almost every single news anchor is on vacation and a vast amount of Americans are paying less attention than ever.

That tells you how afraid they are, they know the move is needed to help in 2014 but don’t dare have anyone who isn’t paying attention realize it. What does that tell me the GOP should do for election 2014?

“Ride right through them, etc etc etc”

Now during the LAST Election Cycle when I pointed out each and every move the left made that indicated demoralization (Little did I know they were demoralized as hell enough to use the IRS to stop the tea party but I digress) I didn’t bother to give Mitt Romney & the GOP advice on what to do with it because I foolishly believed that the Mitt Romney campaign was run by smart people who realized elections aren’t beanbag.

Unfortunately, little did I realize that even with the White House at state, the GOP establishment in general and the Romney Campaign in particular were only interested in playing hardball when facing their base or the tea party.

So from now on when do a: Demoralized as hell post: I’m going to tell them how to ride right through them.

Here is what needs to be done:

1. Conservative bloggers: We need to write about it. If we live in Democrat districts we need to ask our Dem Reps attending 4th of July Parades ON CAMERA what they think of this move and post it and when we write about the races in the future we need to constantly reference and reinforce it. We also need to challenge potential Democrat candidates on this question in every race that we have access to.

2. Tea parties: We need letters to the editor by members and op-eds from the local chapter presidents written to run from Sunday to Monday to make sure it is seen

3. Potential GOP congressional candidates for House and the senate need to guest themselves on local Radio & TV and talk about this, make sure if you appear during the weekend or Monday you bring this up.

4. The House leadership: You have two options one is bolder than the other but whichever choice you make PUSH IT:

PLAN A. Extremely Bold: The House could bring up a vote mandating the immediate implementation of Obamacare.

Such a bill puts the democrats on the spot, if democrats in the house are smart and vote against it en masse you can make it a practically unanimous vote and you have a talking point that MUST be repeated by every member on every show: Obamacare is so bad the democrats practically voted unanimously to not implement it.

If they are dumb enough vote for it, generate enough votes to send it to the senate, saying: “We disagree but the Democrats insist Obamacare is vital so in the spirit of co-operation we’re going to give them a chance to prove it”.

The senate is where the real action is

Harry Reid now has a choice, does he bring up the vote and have his 21 democrats running for re-election including all the swing seat democrats vote for this or does he dodge?

You want him in that spot every single day and you want every single GOP challenger in those 21 districts to be pushing this question.

The risk: Dems pass this, the train wreck comes early and the GOP gets some blame for it but it comes pre-election.

Plan B: Less bold Offer a bill to mandate that no provisions of Obamacare are implemented till all are.

The argument is simple, Obamacare has been the law of the land for 3 years and it’s coming in piecemeal. This is making it harder and harder. The bill would simply mandate that the three-year old law’s provisions are all implemented together.

Since this law is supposedly so beneficial what is the case of the democrats saying no? If they maintain it takes time to do so point out it they’ve already had 3 years and continue to PUSH it.

5. The Base: Yes you dear reader has a part in this. When bloggers post about it, Tea Party members write their letters, potential GOP candidates talk about it and a GOP congress use their tactic, TALK about it. Put it on Facebook, on twitter, make sure your friends and neighbors those low information voters see it. Amply our voice as we try to amply yours.

The folks at PEW have released their last poll of the year and their headline seems to be good news for President Obama and bad news for me who has predicted his defeat:

Barack Obama has edged ahead of Mitt Romney in the final days of the presidential campaign. In the Pew Research Center’s election weekend survey, Obama holds a 48% to 45% lead over Romney among likely voters.

Here is the line from the Poll

Leftistsitesarerejoicingat a 3 pt lead with seemingly no time for Romney to change it, I’m sure Nate Silver is already boosting his averages.

Alas for the left, PEW also released their internals and even worse for them I haven’t forgotten how to do basic math so lets look at this last attempt to pretend something is true that isn’t.

First the splits in Party (click to enlarge) :

Pew interviewed 2709 people, 2611 identified themselves as either Republicans Democrats or Independents by their own count 843 Republicans, 1007 democrats and 761 independents. That works out to the following:

So right off the bat we have a poll with a base advantage for Democrats of 6 pts. Even though both Gallup and Rasmussen have told us that the electorate is majority GOP this time around.

That would be enough to laugh this poll off but the mathematical legerdemain doesn’t end there.

All year we were told that this election was going to be who by he who took the independent voters. If you look at this new Pew poll who is leading among independents? Why lo and behold it is….Mitt Romney by 44% to 41% The GOP goes for Romney 91-7 & dems for Obama 94-5

But that doesn’t matter, apparently at this late date the independent vote that was so important just a few months ago doesn’t matter in election 2012 anymore.

That’s strike two but you need three strikes for an out, is there a third one? Guess what, there is!

If we look at the sample in terms of Gender did you know that the electorate in 2012 women are going to outvote men? As there are more women than men that’s not so odd, until you look at the margin… (click to enlarge)

Pew polled 1538 women vs 1171 men. That works out to the following percentages:

Women 1538 /2709 = 56.8
Men 1171 /2709 = 43.2

No wonder the women’s vote is so important! According to PEW apparently women aren’t going to just outvote men in 2012. They are going to do so in this election by 13 whole points! That is pretty interesting, particularly if you look at this chart from a pew study from just 4 years ago

In 2008 Pew reports a 4.2 point turnout advantage over men. Perish the thought, apparently according to THIS poll the 2012 gap is going to make that 2008 figure look positively miniscule…

…if you buy it that is.

OK that’s three strikes, but lets add a throw to first just in case this gets by the Catcher.

Let’s take a closer look at this sample, how representative of the electorate is it? Well one way to find out is to see how this group voted last time around (click to enlarge):

Well look at that a 13 point advantage of Obama voters vs McCain voters, but again this is registered voters, so lets remove those who didn’t vote so we can get down to those likely guys, what would the numbers be?

Obama voters 46 / 86 voters = 53.4%

Ok that seems to mean these voters President Obama took 52.9% of the vote so that’s a full half a point MORE than the president’s share of the vote in 2008

McCain voters 33 / 86 voters = 38.3%

Hmmmm John McCain drew 45.7% of the vote so this figure is a full 7.4 points BELOW John McCain’s vote total from 2008

That a 15.1 point gap in the popular vote that Barack Obama won by 7.2 points, MORE THAN DOUBLE the actual 2008 number. That’s a throw to first to end the inning and the game.

So this is what the Pew poll would have you believe:

#1 We are going to have a D+6 electorate even though all signs indicate the Democrats are not all that thrilled with president Obama but in 2010 the republicans managed historic wins in the states, and the house and big senate wins too.

#2 Even though independents favor Mitt Romney by 3 points in this poll and Republicans are voting 91-7 for Mitt according to their own number the electorate in 2012 is SO democratic that Obama is still up by 3 points

#3 The female electorate on election day is going to outnumber the male electorate by a full 13 points thus negating any advantage that Mitt Romney might have with men.

#4 A sample where the people interviewed supported Obama in 2008 by a figure double than the actual result should be trusted to show us how the electorate will vote in 2012.

There is a phrase to describe this kind of thinking, it’s known as “Willing suspension of disbelief”.

While that is dandy if you are a Doctor Who fan watching the Doctor reverse the polarity of the neutron flow, it doesn’t do a whole lot of good if you are trying to figure out how an election is going to end up in the real world.

The fact that PEW and the left is flogging a D+6 poll with a +13 point sample of women is funny, that this poll shows Romney leading among independents yet has Obama up 3 is funnier, that you are releasing a poll two days before an election that has a sample whose members supported Obama at double the rate of 2008 isn’t just funny it screams one thing:

This is the type of thing you do when you’ve got nothing else, they’ve got NOTHING and we are going to beat them so bad they are going to wonder why they were so willing to sell their credibility on a candidate as bad as this president.

Update: If you think this is trouble for the left consider the new CNN poll. As Breitbart reports:

Moreover, the polls’s crosstabs indicate that Romney is winning self-described independent voters by a giant 59%-37% margin. A 22-point lead among independents virtually guarantees victory for Romney. Yet Democrats are so heavily over-represented in the CNN poll that Romney’s 22-point lead becomes a mere 49%-49% tie.

A total of 1,010 adults were interviewed by telephone nationwide by live interviewers calling both landline and cell phones. All respondents were asked questions concerning basic demographics, and the entire sample was weighted to reflect national Census figures for gender, race, age, education, region of country, telephone usage and whether respondents own or rent their homes. Registered voters were asked questions about their likelihood of voting, past voting behavior, and interest in the campaign; based on answers to those questions, 693 respondents were classified as likely voters. Respondents who reported that they had already cast an absentee ballot or voted early were automatically classified as likely voters. Among those likely voters, 41% described themselves as Democrats, 29% described themselves as Independents, and 30% described themselves as Republicans.

Media Credibility day not withstanding, if you are going to skew a poll with a D+11 sample to get a tie you might as well get a D+12 sample and give Obama a lead. If you are going to make a fool of yourself, why not?
It has Mitt & Obama Tied at 49, but only manages this feat with a +d11 sample

I haven’t dived deeply into polls much lately because frankly there has been no point, Mitt Romney has this race and baring the “Live Boy Dead girl” scenario it’s not changing. (actually considering Romany’s rep it wouldn’t take a dead girl, a live girl would shatter his clean image completely)

But with one week to go the last gasp effort to rally the MSNBC troops took place today on Morning Joe as they touted the Quinnipiac/CBS?NYT polls Saying Obama is up 5 in Ohio with a week to go.

What really got me was their claim that the Quinnipiac poll was the “most accurate” and again playing the “poll denier” card. I’ve personally found their numbers the least believable and while they were talking about the fights in other states as an alternative to Ohio for Romney I looked up the internals of this Ohio/VA/Florida poll and found this:

After talking about how reliable Quinnipiac is, for 15 minutes and while I was tweeting out the D+8 samples in all of these states D+7 in Florida, they suddenly pivoted as Mark Halperin brought up the D+8 sample and people asked how can this be the case if Mitt is up by huge margins among independents in this poll?

At this time they made the case that the split in the sample defines the electorate while I argue that the accurate of the poll is based on how the splits match the electorate.

Now Polls have limitation based on the response rate and the various methods of getting people to answer but the actual registration and demographics of a state are a reality, they may change over time but they are what they are no matter what but of a sample is used.

In the 7 AM Hour more of the same and in the 8 AM hour they repeated this nonsense. This isn’t a poll, this is a last gasp before Media Credibility day arrives and it becomes impossible to deny what already exists.

That the Morning Joe team is spending a show trying to sell the accuracy of a D+8 poll in Ohio & VA & +7 in Fla to their far left base speaks volumes, here is what it says to me:

When you are reduced to Chuck Todd arguing body language in private conversations that’s pretty bad, by contrast you have Romney people canvasing during the damn storm.

Folks, there is going to be a turnout effort in Ohio like you’ve never seen. George Cullen has been canvassing door-to-door for the past five weeks. He usually hits about 50 doors a day, but only got 25 under the storm conditions yesterday. He’s a West Point graduate who served six years in the Army, and he says, “The conservatives are very energized.”

Yeah this is a D+8 state SURE! It will be fun to watch these guys next Wednesday.

Update: Just called Robert Stacy McCain on the ground in Ohio and asked about the “Body Language” stuff from Chuck Todd: “It’s crazy” He spoke to Kevin Madden on Sunday one of the top guys in the Romney Campaign after rally. He seemed calm and laid back. He hasn’t seen any of this scary “Body Language” from the Romney folks.

They are still working hard, they have not slacked off nor would anyone expect them to but if our friends on the left want to tell themselves this, as the folks in the south say “Bless their Hearts”.

In each of these three states, the CBS/NYT/Q-poll shows Republicans at a lower percentage level of turnout than in the 2008 election. If one makes that assumption, it’s not too difficult to be guess that Obama might be ahead. However, that’s exactly the opposite of what all other polls rating enthusiasm are telling us what the electorate will look like on Tuesday. In fact, it’s not even what this poll shows, with Republican enthusiasm +16 over Democrats in Florida, +14 in Ohio, and +7 in Virginia.

I guess that explains why we didn’t see Ed on the show today. I suspect that message wouldn’t have been all that welcome.

Update 3: Instalanche and Michael Graham who you might recall was the owner of the site “Anybody But Mitt” says what is coming:

I believe we’re on the verge of a solid Romney win for two reasons. One is the objective evidence. The other is the ugly desperation of the Obama campaign in its final days.

and he raises a very important point I never thought of:

The president, on the other hand, has peaked at 47 percent. The Battleground Poll model shows Obama losing 52 percent to 47 percent. Rasmussen daily tracking has Obama losing 49 percent to 47 percent. Pew has him tied: 47 percent to 47 percent. But more important, all the polls show Obama sliding or stuck. None show any upward movement.

Obama supporters are quick to tell you “the only poll that matters is the one on Election Day.” Two things: a) that’s what candidates who are behind always say; b) this is election day.

You might think some reporter at the New York Times, which co-sponsored this poll, would think it worth his while to interview the people at Quinnipiac and ask where they’re getting these weird over-samples of Democrats. What is causing this? How is it that Republicans report greater voting enthusiasm by such large margins, and yet are underrepresented in the poll’s sample? It makes no sense.

We are now a week away from election day and the MSM has been given a gift called Sandy.

Why do I call it a gift to the MSM? Because it gives them a story that overwhelms all others allowing them to put the election on the second or third tier as Romney continues his march.

I have been telling you for a while that the best way to determine what is happening is what people are saying, vs what people are doing.

Yesterday I was listening to Rush on a Minnesota radio station because all the local stations were all Sandy all the time and what did to my wondering eyes did appear but news of Bill Clinton going right there.

Now let’s be clear, There is the president, there is VP and there is Bill Clinton, these are the big guns for the Democrats and are not deployed lightly.

You are sending the single most valuable non-office asset the Democrats have to Minnesota? Not Colorado? Not Nevada, not Wisconsin, not Iowa, not Virginia but MINNESOTA?

How on earth do you justify this move with a week to go unless Obama is in trouble there and if Obama is in trouble in Minnesota then….

As for Pennsylvania we Reported Paul Ryan has done events there, which tells you plenty remember Time is the one commodity you can’t get more of and if Ryan was campaigning in PA last week that means something. Now both sides are spending money in the state but with a difference. The GOP money is a super pac outside of the campaign, the Obama money is DIRECTLY FROM THE CAMPAIGN.

If the White house is spending its limited funds in Pennsylvania then that says…

Finally Florida, the big swing state what are we hearing about Florida.

Zip

Florida WAS a swing state, it was a state everyone spend a lot of time talking about how Paul Ryan was going to drive seniors away from the party.

None of this has happened. This state is in now a Romney State

If the game is no longer being played in Florida and is now being played in Minnesota & Pennsylvania know what that says?

Does this mean Romney is going to win Pennsylvania? No, but it does mean that it’s close enough that Team Obama couldn’t afford to let Romney air ads unopposed in Pennsylvania. And this news, coming just four days after it was reported that Team Obama is buying ads in Minnesota, is the best indication that Democrat insiders know that the president’s re-election is seriously endangered.

Guys, Romney is going to win this race and it’s not going to be close.

Romney has faced economic challenges at key points in his professional and political careers and has always seemed to grow in the job to deliver greater expectations than when he went in. President Obama, on the other hand, lacked any prior experience before entering the White House in 2008 and appears overwhelmed by the one serious economic challenge he has confronted.

The complements to Romney are strong but the brickbats swung at the President are not something you would expect to read from a Massachusetts paper that endorsed him the last time around.

President Obama continues to say America is in an economic recovery. The families broken by his recovery, whose cornerstone was Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus package, know otherwise: Public-sector employees and union workers got “shovel-ready” projects and dollars; the private-sector got the shaft and more regulations.

In 2008, an unproven Obama promised things would turn out differently with him in charge. “Change we can believe in” is how he put it. Four years later we realize it was all made up.

All made up? Can we make it sound even worse? YES IT CAN!

Obama isn’t even trying to defend the indefensible — his failing four-year record. Instead, in partisan style he is blaming others, including Democrat and Republican predecessors, for driving America to the edge of fiscal insolvency.

When Obama looks into a mirror, he must see Jimmy Carter staring back at him.

President Obama makes a weak case for re-election. He says his policies need four more years to kick in. This from a commander-in-chief who hasn’t passed a federal budget in three years, hasn’t submitted a comprehensive energy bill in four years, and hasn’t given voters an inkling of where America might be headed through 2016. Where’s your plan, Mr. President?

Remember this is a MASSACHUSETTS Newspaper in a City with a Democrat Mayor, a majority Democrat City council, a Democrat State Rep and a Democrat State Senator represented by a Democrat Congressman.

In The Sentinel & Enterprise’s view, that’s where America has fallen off track these past four years. America trusted a “hope and change” candidate, it didn’t work, and we’re suffering the consequences. Now we’ve got a tested leader with a proven track record standing before us — Mitt Romney — and it’s his time to inspire Americans to greatness.

When Newspapers who endorsed Obama in 2008 in Massa D+26 chusetts are writing editorials like this with two weeks to go before election that means one thing:

Robert Stacy McCain and the Sept Finance Report drives the final stake through the Democrats Heart:

The Democrats ended September with cash on hand of $4.6 million, compared to the Republican National Committee’s $82.6 million.

That’s nearly an 18-to-1 cash advantage for Republicans.

And if you think that’s bad this is worse:

the DNC, they had to take out loans to pay the bills so that they owed $20.5 million at the end of September, meaning that that (subtracting cash on hand from total debt) they were $15.9 million in the red — essentially bankrupt. Wasserman-Schultz’s committee only raised $3.7 million in September; at that pace, it would take them more than four months to clear their debt, even if they didn’t spend another dime in the meantime.

What is the most significant word in this story? SEPTEMBER.

You see the first debate wasn’t until Oct 3rd. September was the DNC in Charlotte. It took place the first week of the month. A convention that our media friends told us was such a success for the Obama Campaign, A Convention the media told us put Romney in a big hole, a convention that meant Romney would need a miracle of a debate performance to recover from.

Yet in the land of Realville in that awesome month for the left when the month when Republicans were going down for the third time the people who actually write the checks were so impressed by the party they left them in a state where they had about 6% of the cash the GOP did.

You can believe one of two things, either the money men all employed psychics who were under the influence of Pyroviles:

Sept 1st 2012 Big Money INC HQ

or the media was shoveling in the hopes of bucking up the left and scaring the right.

Remember when the map was solidly against Mitt Romney, when I even heard some people suggest he could win the popular vote but lose because the map was too daunting: Well Guess what Time is publishing:

Here’s why some Democrats are worried tonight. If Romney wins the three Southern battlegrounds (FL, NC, and VA) and OH, he is at 266 electoral votes. Leaving the other five battlegrounds unallocated, that means Obama would be at 237 and Romney would only need to win one of the remaining five states to get to 270+. See the map above.

One senior Democratic official expressed real concern tonight unlike I have heard before about Ohio potentially slipping away from Obama (the state has been trending Republican in statewide races,

It’s even worse, if this map is correct not only does Mitt only have to take one of these states (and he WILL take NH) but he could take Wisconsin, Colorado and the Granite State, Lose Ohio and Still hit 270.

That this map is coming out BEFORE the 2nd debate is bad for the left, that it was discussed on MSNBC makes it even worse.

I woke up late today and have been trying to think of how to properly encapsulate the reaction of the far left to Joe Biden’s performance last night. In my travels this morning I found exactly what I wanted in a sign in front of a person’s house on Providence Street in Fitchburg

Ignoring for a moment the “How long have they had a chimp problem on Providence Street?” question, nothing better describes the MSNBC/P2 crowd today than this image.

The entire “demoralized as hell” meme is all about how our friends on the left have been selling the American people an alternative version of reality not in sync with actual events and yesterday’s debate provided the best example of this.

Democrats running for office have been running away from Barack Obama for a year. After the president’s debate performance the American People started joining them. To the left who had embraced the Sam Tanenhaus “death of conservatism” meme, who discounted the midterm election and who considered the victory of people like Ted Cruz and Mia Love in GOP primaries as a bug rather than a feature of the conservative movement, panic and depression set in. They needed something, ANYTHING to convince them all is not lost.

But to the MSM, to MSNBC, to Chris Matthews, Ed Schultz and to every leftist who were preparing to move to Massachusetts after election day in the hope that Question #2 will pass and they can end it all Joe Biden was a savior.

HE stopped the bleeding. He fought back. He showed the Democrat party was better than the GOP. He was a man schooling a boy. He re-energized the base!

Never mind that the election is 27 days away and they’re losing.

Never mind the need to expand the base.

Never mind that Paul Ryan at that same table succeeded at the only job he had in this debate, demonstrating that he was perfectly capable of stepping into the #1 spot if something, God forbid should happen to Mitt Romney in the next four years.

No, says the left, we aren’t hearing any of this, we don’t see it! All we saw was a mighty warrior who vanquished the evil youth who is going to kill our seniors and sell our poor for sausages. You can say all you want that this debate didn’t move voters away from Mitt but we’re not listening to you!

The activist MSNBC left can put its fingers in its ears all it wants, it can pretend this debate is a game changer rather than, at best, a draw, but the few democrats involved in the campaign still living in realville understand that all Joe Biden performance accomplished was bandaging an open wound. It might stop the bleeding but it’s not going to get the patient in any condition to win a race.

And 27 days is not a lot of time left for them so that means one thing for us on the right:

1. I have a special edition of DaTechGuy on DaRadio coming up 1 p.m. EST on WCRN AM 830 listen live at wcrnradio.com

2. Saturday I will be doing my show live from the American Products Store’s American Crafts show. The Crafts event is from 9-3 I’ll be broadcasting from 10-noon 187 Main Street – that’s Route 9- in Cherry Valley

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David Freddoso who said on Twitter that if all you knew about Romney was what you saw in Obama’s TV ads, you’d get the sense that Obama’s been lying to you all this time. Romney helped himself tonight — possibly a lot.

As we get closer and closer to election day (or should I say the day when the votes are counted since early voting has started in some states) there has been a small tremor that lately has gotten less and less press both in Massachusetts and nationwide. That is the effect of citizen activists taking an interest in the vote.

No I’m not talking about the activists that the Democrat party funds via Government Largess via Unions etc such as Neighbor to Neighbor in Worcester and ACORN who like the machines of old are tasked with providing the vote totals the left needs by shall we say , all necessary means. I’m referring to the grass roots tea party folk whose involvement in electoral politics is cause for organization wide concern for the left.

When the large tea party groups held their rallies in Washington, while there was some surprise there was very little worry on the left or the media. After all annually the March For Life protests was (and still is) the largest protest in Washington and the MSM has successfully ignored its numbers to the point where the hundreds of thousands of people who participate might as well be invisible. The left was sure they could count on the MSM to downplay the numbers and effect of these crowd.

But something different happened when the tea party folks made it home. Something the left did not suspect.

Our friends from the left, so used to their own paid protesters and rent-a-mobs, assumed that once there was a picture for the media to see people would simply fade away until the next media opt.

Then never imagined that without the pay from a large organization that people might actually get involved.

With Scott Brown’s victor in January of 2010 came the first actual shock to the left, the idea that there might be something going on here. 10 months later the results of the house elections gave the left another huge shock. 63 seats worth of shock.

In Massachusetts the left woke up in time for the election. The hand that they had kept behind their back because it wasn’t needed was brought out. The left and the union had people all over the state, making sure the Bay State remained solidly in the “D” Column.

The left breathed a huge sigh of relief in the state figuring this was the high water mark for the right.

Then came the official loss of an electoral seat, then came the retirement of Barney Frank,

and then came people like Bonnie Johnson a tea party activist who started delivering some startling news concerning the law in Massachusetts:

Every January Massachusetts Cities and town send out a city/town census to every residence. It lists the registered voters in the dwelling and how they are registered. I’ve filled it out every year without a thought, not noticing the warnings on the form if it is not done.

I had filled out the form for years not thinking a word about not realizing its significance

If the form is not returned the people on them are marked as an “inactive” voter. By law an “inactive” voter who attempts to vote must fill out and sign a form and provide proof of both residence and identity to be able to vote.

The law had been on the books for a long time but when you never have contested elections nobody really cared about it, she visited tea party groups in the states and delivered the message:

The problem seems to be a lot of people are not aware of the law, and if you want it enforced you need people at the polls volunteering and working to ensure it IS enforced.

The results have been training session that taught people what the rules were and how to be sure they were enforced while poll watching, at the time I asked Bonnie Johnson how this works:

DaTechGuy: Now how would the poll worker know that it’s an inactive voter is there like an “I” next to it someplace?”

Bonnie Johnson: There’ a lower case “i” next to their name.

DTG: Now is the poll worker required to demand this or does an observer have to bring this up from your experience?

BJ:The Poll worker should demand this.

DTG: So if the poll worker doesn’t demand it, if you are an observer you can say “This person was inactive, you are required to do this.”

BJ:Correct.

DTG: And this is by state law?

BJ:Absolutely.

But nobody had been enforcing the law, why bother? the elections in Massachusetts were as contested as elections in Iraq during the Saddam era, but now you have people being forced to enforce the law with the following result

BJ: In Worcester 99,000 voters 46% of them became inactive when they did this.

Remember Worcester is the 2nd biggest city in New England Behind Boston and Scott Brown lost the city by just under 2000 votes out of 38,282 cast. The number of now inactive votes exceeds the total number of votes cast in the 2010 special election. In Boston Scott Brown lost the city by 38 points. Just under 60,000 votes. Imagine if you are a democrat poll and a well funded Scott Brown campaign has poll watchers in every precinct who KNOW THE RULES.

Fast forward to this year’s state primary election, held on September 6, 2012. Countercharges, of voter fraud and “voter suppression,” were levied by and against Worcester Tea Party observers on that day. Worcester Tea Party members say that they observed people being escorted into the polling precincts, again by Neighbor to Neighbor wearing their purple shirts. In addition, allegations of voters showing resident alien – green cards – as identification were witnessed. The observers tried to document this and were thrown out of the polling location, they would say illegally, for doing so.

City officials, led by Councilor Saral Rivera, stormed into the voting precinct to allege voter intimidation by the neutral observers, to the Democratic primary. Numerous hearings have been held by both the City Council and the Election Commission to determine what happened on that day. As the New York based newspaper up the street’s editorial board has said no credible evidence has been presented showing voter intimidation. So far little evidence has been found that the Election Commission has refused to call for a formal investigation.

And when the author of this piece Rob Eno of Red Mass Group tweeted out things like this

In precinct 10-3 in #worcester voters asking where they get their money for voting for a particular candidate #mapoli

oh Harassing it it? Well if those tea party folks were harassing people instead of making sure the law is obeyed I’m sure the Worcester Election commission dominated by democrats would demand an investigation to make sure voters aren’t being intimidated….

The Election Commission is holding off, at least for the time being, on calling for a formal investigation into allegations that some observers violated the rights of voters during the Sept. 6 state primary.

But…but the harassment, the intimidation of minority voters, surely the people victimized by these scurrilous actions complained. Surely groups like Neighbor to Neighbor being community organizers devoted to protecting the rights of voters have submitted this information to the city or the state…

it was pointed out that no formal written complaints or affidavits have been filed by any poll wardens or aggrieved parties with either the Election Commission or the secretary of state’s office.

..or not.

No complaints, no affidavits no sworn statements? If this is true the question is WHY?

I suspect the answer is closely related to a question I asked a few weeks ago concerning the left’s complaints over voter ID laws in Pennsylvania:

Why should producing an ID change the result of any election?

Why should the use of an item needed at any bank, to cash any paycheck or government check, to use a credit card, an item you are asked to produce at a hospital, at a supermarket or even to buy booze cause the results of an election to change? Do Democrats need these ID less that republicans?

The answer is simple. There are no affidavits because those would be declarations made under oath that would have to be defended in open court. Just like showing an ID or filling out an affidavit for a provisional ballot would be a declaration under oath that a voter is who they say they are and live where they say they live.

In a federal election that’s a federal offense.

In 1941 Lyndon Johnson ran in a special election for the US Senate, his primary opponent was the sitting Governor Pappy O’Daniel. Johnson campaigned hard (nobody worked harder at campaigning than Lyndon Johnson) and was not shy about stealing or buying votes either, but Johnson make the fatal mistake allowing some of his “owned” precincts report early giving O’Daniel the ability to know how many votes he needed to steal/buy/fix to win this election.

Robert Caro in his first volume on Lyndon Johnson “The Path to Power” told of Johnson’s reaction on page 739:

Johnson’s reaction was to try to steal it back. Telephoning George Paar, he asked the Duke of Duval to give him more votes. But Parr Refused; he later told friends he replied “Lyndon, I’ve been to the federal penitentiary, and I’m not going back for you.”

The left can bluster, they can scream and they can cry, but as long as there are tea party people watching, as long as the activists are ready and educated on the law, as long as campaigns like Scott Brown has the money to make sure that any person trying to cast an illegal ballot. (or should be call them undocumented ballots) will be challenged and subject to the full penalty of the law then those who have been unchallenged for years will think long and hard before they take that risk.

THAT is why the left is fighting so hard, THAT is why there is worry, that is why we are reduced to polls like Sunday’s Columbus Dispatch suggesting somehow Mitt Romney with 90% of the GOP vote and with 40.8 of the independent votes vs 41.7 to Obama is somehow down by 9.

And it’s also why they are not covering what the Tea Party is doing as Glenn Reyonlds reports:

the mainstream press isn’t very interested in covering this kind of thing anyway. Stories about Obama grassroots organizers in 2008 were fine. Stories about the Tea Party organizing this time around would conflict with the preferred (if somewhat contradictory) narratives that the Tea Party is (1) just a bunch of billionaire-funded astroturf; and (2) a preserve of racist “bitter clingers” who are too busy digging for Obama birth certificates to engage in hard political work.

Either way, these kinds of initiatives will make a difference. The question, again, is whether they’ll make enough of a difference.

That is the big fear, what do you do if there is a pool of activists not controlled by a major party, a group that you can’t office political goodies to in the hope they will simply go away?

You can’t do a damn thing about them, you can holy hope to outwork them with your paid guys.

A Commonwealth Court judge said Thursday that he was considering allowing most of the state’s controversial voter identification law to remain intact for the November election and was contemplating only a very narrow injunction.

Judge Robert E. Simpson Jr. said at the end of the second and last day of a hearing on whether to halt voter ID requirements for the Nov. 6 election that he was considering an injunction that would target the portion of the law that deals with provisional ballots.

You can tell what the folks at Philly.com think of it by the title in the link…

Yesterday while he was campaigning in NY for GOP candidate Ovide Lamontagne I asked NJ Governor Chris Christie about the poll skews and media dishonesty. His answer was pure Christie:

“I don’t think you win races by complaining about and whining about the media you bring your message out and then you know what to do.”

This is a very important point, While it is important for us in the New Media to call out the MSM and the dishonest CBS/NYT/Quinnipiac poll the worst thing the Romney campaign can do is go off message.

If voters decide the 2012 election based on Obama’s economic record, he will lose. And so the liberal media, as in love with him as ever, is helping him parade shiny objects to distract voters from that record.

and this is what these polls are all about, the goal is to take Romney off the current game that has him according to this same CBS/NYT/Quinnipiac poll AHEAD with independents in both Ohio & Florida (they didn’t provide figures for Pennsylvania).

If Romney is taking 90%+ from GOP voters and wins independents in these states he wins, PERIOD. Whatever he is doing seems to be having that effect. This means he needs to keep doing what he is doing and MORE of it, the Examiner again from the same editorial:

If he wishes to be president, Romney must not take the bait.

This doesn’t worry me Mitt Romney’s strengths, he is a “realville” numbers guy, one glance at these internals and he will under stand it and is unlikely to take the bait and change course from a message that is winning among independents.

The MSM will do it’s best to try to make him do otherwise and some of the pseudo “professional” GOP talking heads the network hires will agree but Mitt Romney knows what he is doing and that is this

I just received a new poll for Ma-3 (My congressional district) that says a lot about the races in Massachusetts.

This is a district that is newly formed so there are not concrete numbers available for the party splits (I am systematically calling each town in the district to get the numbers hope to have them by the end of the week). But while we don’t have the party splits we DO have the numbers from the Scott Brown election for the district in 2010:

Brown 57% 129521
Coakley 42% 95820
Kennedy<1% 2181

There are of course three races going on here the first is for president:

Barack Obama – 52%
Mitt Romney – 44%
Undecided – 4%

This at first glance looks like bad news for Mitt in Mass, To even have an outside chance of winning in Massachusetts he needs big numbers in areas outside of Boston, Worcester & Springfield.

Meanwhile in the Congressional race looks very similar

Niki Tsongas – 52%
Jon Golnik­ – 45%
Undecided – 3%

Tsongas is running even with Obama but Golnik is already closer than the last time he faced her. Can he he close a 7 pt gap. It should be doable, it will take hard work and turnout but it CAN be done.

Meanwhile here is are Scott Brown numbers these hold the key for all the races we have talked about.

Scott Brown – 54%
Elizabeth Warren – 42%
Undecided – 4%

At first glance this poll might be encouraging to Elizabeth Warren, she is still even with Martha Coakley and Brown would have to that 3 out of the remaining 4 pts of undecided to match the last go around. But there are several reasons to worry here if I’m Warren first comes this split in the polls

Female – 55%

Male – 45%

Yes you read that right, you have a +10 pt gap women vs Men and yet Scott Brown out polls that champion of women Liz Warren by 12 points (and remember this was taken BEFORE the law license revelations of today)

“But DaTechGuy”, you say, “didn’t you teach us not to jump until you see the splits what were the splits on this poll?”

I’m so glad you asked here are the splits in this poll:

Democrat – 31%
Republican – 17%
Independent / Other – 52%

That’s +14 for dems in a +24 state (-4 dem vs +6 GOP compared to statewide, undeclared is the same) This is a much more GOP section of the state but I’ll need till the end of the week to confirm by how much but lets note the following:

In a sample that is +14 dem & +10 women

Barack Obama only has an 8 point lead on Mitt Romney
Nikki Tsongas only has a 7 point lead on Jon Golnik

And Scott Brown leads Elizabeth Warren by 12 points! Twelve POINTS!

Brown needs a good gap here to win in Mass and for Mitt to have any chance at winning the state he has do to better but to pull these kind of numbers with a -14 disadvantage if extrapolated statewide & nationally says a lot about both Warren & Obama and none of it good.

While all of that is important lets look at this congressional race and the numbers involved.

Favorable/Unfavorable

Tsongas is +22 with a 57% Favorability Ratings. She has a famous name and is a sitting congresswoman but more importantly she is a pleasant person. Additionally only 8% of the electorate dosn’t have an opinion so that’s a real advantage.

Her Opponent Jon Golnik has a +16 Favorability Ratings, that’s nothing to sneeze at particularly in a -14 poll sample but the big difference here is 34% of those polled either haven’t heard of him or haven’t made up their minds.

This is his opening, 7 points is extremely doable and Golink has several things he can do

1. Obamacare: Remember Obamacare was the reason Scott Brown did so well last time, Nikki Tsongas has (to her credit) not run away from her vote for the Unpopular law. Golnik needs to tie her Obamacare so tightly to Nikki Tsongas that if she fell into the water she could use her vote as a flotation device.

2. Brown/Golnik Warren/Tsongas: Scott Brown was an early endorser of Jon Golnik, he needs to play up, it must be Golnik & Brown vs Tsongas & Warren. If Scott Brown so much as goes stop to go get Gas anywhere in the District Golnik needs to sanding next to him. Any Brown event in Ma-3 HAS to be a Golnik event meanwhile all over Fitchburg I see Nikki Tsongas & Elizabeth Warren signs together, great, link them by the hip.

3. Positive Positive Positive: Hitting a 66 year old widow of a beloved figure in the state isn’t going to do the trick, the instinct to go negative needs to be resisted (and no tying her to Obamacare is not negative advertising, that’s the truth)

The case to make is this: Nikki Tsongas is a nice person and an honest person, she just wrong. That’s the ad: Nikki Tsongas & Elizabeth Warren, wrong on Obamacare, wrong on Taxes and wrong for the 3rd District. Jon Golnik like Scott brown believes lower taxes, ending the Mandate of Obamacare and will fight to bring jobs back to new 3rd district.

This race is completely winnable by Jon Golnik with some hard work and some smart moves but if you are the left consider this: In Massachusetts with a +14 D sample and a +10 Women sample has an opponent in striking range.

If this is the situation in Massachusetts what must it be nationwide in states where Obama is not as popular?

They have party identification results online dating back to 2004. Here are the 2012 numbers through August

That shows a GOP advantage in registration this year but you might say: “Hey, Datechguy, you’ve been hitting polls all year, why can’t THIS poll be wrong?”

That’s a good question, we can answer it by asking another question: Does this poll of party identification correspond with the results of national elections?

Lets take a look:

2004 George Bush wins re-election

The closest the Republicans come to democrats in registration is Sept at a .6 in September. On election day Democrats had a registration advantage of 1.5. Yet not only did George Bush win re-election with that disadvantage but the GOP took 3 senate seats and 3 House seats over 2002.

2006 Midterms Revenge of the left:

In January the GOP was the closest they would be .6 off but by November the Mark Foley scandal was still big news and on election day Democrats had a spread of 6.1 points. This carried them to a net gain of 31 house seats & 5 seats.

2008 The coming of Barack Obama

The year of hope and change. The closest split was 5.6 in January & in September after the Palin Pick but by election day not only was the split 7.6 for Dems but for the first time (Feb) A party had identification over 40%. The Democrats kept that number over 40% 8 out of 12 months that year reaching a high of 41.7% the largest number in this 9 year sample for either party. With these figures it’s should be no surprise that Barack Obama win but Democrats picked up 8 seats in the Senate & 21 Seats in the house.

2010 Midterms The Rise of the Tea Party

2010 proved conclusively that timing is everything for the first time in the nine years, the GOP took an advantage in poll registration from -2.9 to plus 1.3 in one month, and that month was November.

Additionally the 37.0 figure for the GOP was the highest for the party since Dec 2004. At the very same time the 33.7 figure in December was the lowest figure for democrats EVER.

Correspondingly the GOP gained 6 Senate seats (not counting the Jan Scott Brown Race) and in the house picked up 63 seats more than democrats picked up in 2006 & 2008 combined.

These results since 2004 seem to indicate the poll is reliable. So what has it said lately, lets start with 2011 lets look at 2011

This is the year of the great fights between the GOP House & the president and it’s the most interesting year of the lot. The lead changes hands 6 times during the year as the country tries to figure out what it wants and for the first time EVER Other was in the lead, (Aug) tied with the GOP (33.5) ahead of democrats (33.0) other was ahead of the GOP 3 times in 2007.

Now lets look at that 2012 chart again:

At no time during the year do the Democrats have a registration advantage vs republicans, the gap closes in July & re-separates in August. The low point for the GOP was July for 34.9 and the high August at 37.6 For democrats the high was 34.0 in June & July the low was 32.4 in Feb

What does this mean for November? It means a lot.

The Democrats won 2 election in this period 2006 & 2008 with a 6.9 advantage in 2006 & a 7.6 advantage in 2008.

There is no example of the Democrats winning since 2004 with an advantage less that 6.9.

The GOP won two elections in this period 2004 with a -1.6 disadvantage & 2010 with a 1.3 advantage. This means the GOP has proven it can win with not only a small lead but with an actual disadvantage. Additionally with an advantage of only 1.3 they pulled off the biggest house swing in my lifetime.

Can these number change? Well the biggest 1 month swing I’ve seen is 4.2 Oct-Nov in 2010 the biggest 3 month swing was Dec 2007-Feb 2008 6.9 in favor of Democrats at the rise of Obama.

Tell me with the economy in the tank, and the new trouble in the Middle East, what is the prospect of a swing of that size to the Democrats happening again right now? Moreover even if that record registration swing repeated itself right now this would give democrats an advantage of only 2.6 points.

I’ve covered a lot of national polls on this site over the last year and all those polls ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX have one thing in common.

Not a single one of those polls had a sample with a GOP advantage.

As Rush would say: Zip, Zero Nada.

Not only have none of these polls had a GOP advantage but the closest we saw was a D+4 poll.

In every single poll showing Barack Obama ahead on this chart the sample is at least D+4 Even if the biggest swing in history takes place in the next 3 months toward the left that is 1.4 points above what the party split will be.

All of the figures I’ve cited are from a source publicly available. The Media know these figures, the left knows these figures and the Networks know these figures.

Yet they are still using polls with huge democrat samples and representing them as real.

Update 4: I should stress that none of these figures are an argument to be complacent, to not make the calls, to not engage and to not fight for every vote out there. The registration trends are in our favor but apathy is fatal. Be cocky but not lazy.

Thanks to you all, welcome to all the new readers and check out the site, the radio show (latest episode available by clicking on my fedora above) Nice to have you here.

Update 7: BTW for those who don’t know I like Rush have been arguing all the objective data shows the Democrats are not only losing but “Demoralized as Hell” click on the words “Ride Right Through them They’re demoralized as hell” for the full series and if you are a Rush fan you will want to read this or the short version here.

I’ve been arguing for over a year that the media has been doing their best to hide the true condition of this presidential race, but as Glenn Reynolds often says what can’t go on forever won’t. Today some interesting sources of evidence have shown the jig might finally be up.

It’s has been a source of massive frustration to me that people on my own side , today four different pieces of evidence came up

If booing God and his holy city is a part of the Democratic Convention happening in this universe, I’ll take the alternative universe Bill Clinton said the GOP lives in. This is why Barack Obama stands a good chance of losing. It is the Democrats who have disconnected from America.

I’m on record repeatedly doubting Mitt Romney’s viability as a candidate, but more and more I think not only is Romney winning, but the polling is not reflecting the strength of his campaign and the media is actually sabotaging the Democrats’ chance of winning. In fact, I dare say if MItt Romney wins he will have the American media to thank for his win.

The Media, the Media that backs Barack Obama shamelessly? How can it be the media’s fault that Obama is going to lose? A clue comes from a totally unrelated ABC News story on a new book by Woodward.

The failure of Obama to connect with Boehner was vaguely reminiscent of another phone call late in the evening of Election Day 2010, after it became clear that the Republicans would take control of the House, making Boehner Speaker of the House.

Nobody in the Obama orbit could even find the soon-to-be-speaker’s phone number, Woodward reports. A Democratic Party aide finally secured it through a friend so the president could offer congratulations.

Imagine a president so out of touch that the possibility of losing the house in an election where his side lost 63 seats never hit him. And that not all:

Woodward portrays a president who remained a supreme believer in his own powers of persuasion, even as he faltered in efforts to coax congressional leaders in both parties toward compromise. Boehner told Woodward that at one point, when Boehner voiced concern about passing the deal they were working out, the president reached out and touched his forearm.

“John, I’ve got great confidence in my ability to sway the American people,” Boehner quotes the president as having told him.

Hey when you have all the world telling you how great you are, when you have the Nobel committee giving you the peace prize and when you have the MSM drinking the same kool aid you tend to get a swelled head.

“No matter how you spin it.” Think about that. This video is 93 seconds, it was transmitted on CNN live, For a full 13 hours plus it is on the top of Memeorandum. You can watch in less time than it takes to boil an egg. Yet not only is our friend Jackie saying it didn’t happen, but she is totally comfortable saying the following to the entire world:

Now I’m sure Jackie is a very nice and bright young lady, but she is caught in what Erick Erickson refers to as the Media’s Feedback loop:

The Democrats and most of the mainstream media live in a symbiotic relationship and feedback loop. When Todd Akin says something dumb, the media seizes on it and attacks Todd Akin and the GOP. For the past several weeks the media has fixated on how out of touch the GOP is, its platform is, and its Presidential candidate is.

At the same time, the media has been largely silent on the Democratic Platform except for yesterday’s ridiculousness. Even then, the media mostly failed to point out that the Obama campaign said it had approved the platform removing God and Jerusalem, while going to great lengths to point out Obama intervened to put them back in.

It’s sort of like the old Soviet Union Group-think, everybody talking and saying the same line and unable to see outside of their prism.

And this is only the latest version in the last year Three Examples::1. Jon Huntsman:Absolutely nobody was talking about Jon Huntsman as a viable Presidential candidate except the MSM. This MSM drove Huntsman into the race where nobody but the media showed up for his announcement. After months of coverage where the media never failed to insist he was a factor he managed a 3rd place finish in NH driven by Democrat voters crossing over and dropped out before South Carolina when he couldn’t convince people to give him another red cent.

2. The Occupods:It was painfully obvious from the start that the Occupy movement had disaster written all over it, yet the MSM and democrats embraced it assuming it would counter the tea party even though there were solid clues this was a bad idea:

Godwin’s law states that once someone compares his or her opponents in any argument to Nazis, they automatically forfeit that argument. With the American Nazi Party formally endorsing the Occupiers, the question arises: does Godwin’s law apply if you are on the same side as actual Nazis?

Not to be outdone, the Communist Party USA has also backed the Occupy Movement, which gives these protesters support from both of the 20th century’s most successful mass murdering ideologies.

I keep expecting some elder statesman of the left to play Admiral Akbar, and shout to the Democrats who are jumping on the Occupy bandwagon: “It’s a trap!” But it looks like there aren’t any adults left to do so.

3. Elizabeth Warren & the You didn’t build it speech.Running for re-election in Massachusetts for Scott Brown would not be easy, even a mediocre candidate could give him a fight, but while smaller state candidates jumped in there was no outcry for Elizabeth Warren to enter except by the National left and the MSM.

When she finally got in she gave a speech that will live in infamy

This played very poorly among the voters, particularly business owners, but it played very well with the far left National Democrat base. It was such a fundraising boon that President Obama team didn’t think twice before jumping on the “You didn’t build that” bandwagon.

And we all know how that ended

In all of these cases and others I could name, the actual situation was clearly visible to anybody willing to objectively look at evidence and ask questions. Yet the MSM safe in its cocoon never saw it and thus Jackie and people like her had no clue.

Take yesterday, if you didn’t watch Fox or read anything but the left side of the blog world you likely didn’t see this on Tuesday:

People act defensive for a REASON. Anyone who saw Dick Durbin’s reaction would have KNOWN the Democrat platform was not only a disaster in progress but the party was terrified, but this clip didn’t play on other networks, instead the party leaders spun, the left blogs spun and the Jackie’s of the world believed it. Erickson again

The Democrats actually have a very extremist position on abortion. The media that spent so long focused on the GOP’s position has barely dealt with the Democrats. Why? Because most of the mainstream media is in ideological lockstep with the Democrats on this. It’s hard to tell the Democrats they’ve gone too far astray from mainstream America when the mainstream media is over on the lefthand side to begin with.

The Democrats, in other words, overplayed their hand on the War on Women and there is no media voice they listen to saying, “Hold up, you’ve gone too far.” Most of the media is with or to the left of the Democrats on this. For a year now you and I have been hearing about the growing secularization of and atheism in America. I now see that’s no longer a coincidence, but another effort to feed the Democrats’ feedback loop in much the same way polls were being churned out in the press in 2010 showing how popular Obamacare would be despite all objective polling showing it was not.

Remember Todd Akin, the person who had supposedly handed Claire McCaskill her Senate Seat back, the man who could put Missouri into the “toss-up” column, the guy so “extreme” that the left decided to go all Abortion all the time for their convention Sandra Fluke and all.

All of this has not been happening in a vacuum, it’s happened in front of our faces, from the first candidates to decide not to run to the spectacle of the DNC chairperson ducking interviews yesterday. to small blogs saying stuff like this:

The Democrats had a voice vote yesterday on whether to put references to “God” and “Jerusalem” into their party platform. I think it would be unfair to say that the Democrats denied Him three times.

He might think it’s unfair, but even as I write this post the first GOP ad featuring this video has been released by Congressman Allen West:

For the Jackies of the world , it’s another reality, like the American Indians become the first European came to shore, they just can’t visualize it. Erickson one more time:

I really don’t think Mitt Romney is a strong candidate. And I’ve consistently believed he would lose. But now I think he’s winning and doing so largely because the Democrats have so overplayed their hand on social issues while ignoring the economy with no corrective from the media. The American people are aghast at what they are seeing and will respond accordingly at the polls.

The Democrats have made the one always fatal mistake anyone can make in politics — they’ve believed their own press.

I actually think there are quite a few in the media who actually know how things are going, who understand where this is going to end, but will do their best for as long as they can to prop things up until they finally believe it will do them no good.

Do not be surprised if there is a negative bounce from this convention or a poll released with a Dem +6-12 in order to hide just how bad things are.
Update: Robert Stacy McCain:

More politically significant was the Democrats’ official party platform, which was revised this year to omit reference to God, and to delete a previous statement supporting Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. When these revisions sparked negative headlines, party leaders moved quickly to change the platform, but they screwed that up, too. With Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa chairing the convention, a motion was made to re-instate both God and Jerusalem into the platform, but when Villaraigosa called for a voice vote to approve the motion, it was far from clear that the measure had support from the required two-thirds of delegates necessary to pass. After asking the question three times, Villaraigosa finally ruled that the “ayes” had it, producing a storm of booing from the hall. The controversy was sufficiently heated — and the embarrassment sufficiently great — that Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz canceled her scheduled TV appearances, evidently to avoid discussing the issue.

I guess Debbie should have kept cancelling interviews to avoid this on CNN

In the time it takes to watch Debbie Wassermann Schultz in her great new hairdo deny the evidence of our own eyes, a person can watch the original video 6 times.

Update 2: The west video was from a non-West site, uploaded from his own YouTube.

Update 3: Spoke to the West re-election office, this will NOT be only a web ad.

It was OK but wasn’t all that special. When people asked me about the movie however I found my self talking about funny scenes (Do-nut Remover) and laughing. When I went back with my other son I found myself laughing and that’s when it hit me. When I went the first time I was thinking Moe, Larry & Curly from the 30’s & 40’s. the original Stooges. When I saw it without the expectations of the past I was able to enjoy the movie for what it was. (Still didn’t like the baby duel scene).

That brings us to Clint Eastwood at the RNC.

When I watched Eastwood on the stage I thought it was one of the weirdest things I had seen. While he made some great points he looked his age, and while the chair business was something right out of the sixties, Morey Amsterdam and Bob Newhart.

As Time magazine’s Mark Halperin explained on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Friday, “I think everyone has missed that Eastwood’s performance is very closely based on a Morey Amsterdam performance from dinner theater in Bayonne. Kind of night at the improv.”

Amsterdam was a stand-up comic who had his own sitcom on TV from 1948 to 1950 and also appeared on “The Dick Van Dyke Show “as Buddy Sorrell.

But the argument could be made that Eastwood was also evoking a little Bob Newhart, whose classic “Driving Instructor” routine first appeared on his “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart” album in 1960.

This actually makes sense people tend to remember the comedy of their youth (you see a lot of Python here) but the real question is: Did it work?

I noted at the time Eastwood managed to accomplish several things, holding the audience & absorbing the hits from the left, but my thought is that he basically won a news cycle and that’s it.

Not Anymore.

Apparently Clint Eastwood struck a never fever nationally and the White House and the left is worried, VERY Worried.

The right rallied on Labor Day to celebrate “National Empty Chair Day,” a show of solidarity with Clint Eastwood after his rambling address to an invisible President Barack Obama at the Republican National Convention last week.

The action picked up steam on Twitter, where the hashtag #emptychairday began trending on Monday morning as users tweeted pictures of empty chairs in various poses.

And now we have the left trying to get Betty White to counter Eastwood at the DNC: ABC News:

They’ve taken on big banks and workers’ rights abuses, now the progressive activists at Change.org have their sights set on bringing comedienne Betty White, 90, to the Democratic National Convention.

“Clint Eastwood, the Republican’s ‘mystery guest’ at the RNC, gave a bad name to older Americans everywhere with his absurd and awkward-to-watch introduction of Governor Romney,” Peter Slutsky wrote in his petition to draft White. “Governor Romney can have Clint Eastwood and his improvisational skills because President Obama has the one and only Betty White!”

Remember this is Memeorandum TODAY 5 days later and this is still on top.

I thought the Eastwood thing was a one day blip, but I was wrong, this has turned out to be devastating to the left.

One day Stories don’t generate events that generate Politico coverage.

After all, who is Clint Eastwood? He is one of the top actors, directors and producers of motion pictures in the world. Most of the world — and almost certainly everyone tuning in to the RNC Thursday night — knows this. Yet most of the analyses of his RNC appearance are based on the notion that we were not witnessing acting. That mass suspension of disbelief may be the highest tribute Eastwood will ever be paid as an actor. If you think the Eastwood on stage was the only Eastwood there is, watch him promoting J. Edgar on The Daily Show last November. I have little doubt he will be equally sharp promoting Trouble With the Curve in the next few weeks.

There were a lot of speeches yesterday. Mike Eurzonie gave a great one, Marco Rubio made a better one, Clint Eastwood made an odd one and Mitt Romney is giving his as I type this.

In the morning when this post will go up, there will be an awful lot of pixels spent to say what they think about Mitt’s speech but it was not the most important words said on the air yesterday. The most important words came from of all People Michael Moore:

Listen to these quotes:

The big problem is Obama’s base is ‘Yeah I think I’m going to vote for him’ but this time four years ago everybody including myself were working on phone banks.

and this

Young people who were voting for him four years ago are not that enthused and are not working like they were four years ago.

Moore did something you don’t often see him do, give an honest assessment of a situation, acting not as a propagandist but as a realist. He said out loud what a lot of people on the left know and what the media know but are doing their best to hide.

This post has over 10,000 comments I read through a bit over 50% during & after the Romney speech (a good speech but not a killer one) and from what I can see in comments it affirms what I’ve been saying for over a year…

There are times when I really think the left thinks it is still 1992 or 1996 or before, the internet doesn’t exist and nobody is around to dispute a word they put out, but then I sit down and think and realize it’a all about short term gratification.

Yesterday after the Code Pink people failed to properly disrupt Paul Ryan’s speech the entire MSM speaking with one “Journo-listic” voice was screaming “liarLIARLIAR!”

“…Have to prove clearly he is a liar“? Really Howard, Is that your unbiased experienced Journalistic opinion?

I’ve never forgotten that day at Darthmouth College after the debate when I was filming Debbie Wasserman Schultz in the spin room when this same Howard Fineman who is paid as an objective journalist, challenged my being there. So I might be forgiven if I tease him a bit on this.

I don’t claim to have the experience that he does in the field nor the connections of him or Joan Walsh, and I don’t pretend in the least to be unbiased. but you know one thing I apparently have over Howard Fineman and all his friends, the ability to do a Google Search.

…Since they were shut down in 2009, both the Janesville and Tennessee plants have been on standby status, meaning they were not producing vehicles, but they were not completely shut down.

That’s the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal via Twitchy, and here is Legal Insurrection quoting GM you know that company decided to buy for us, itself:

The Janesville plant was closed in 2009 after Obama took over, and as part of the takeover of GM by the government.

That’s when the decision was taken to shutter the Janesville plant for good, as GM itself announced on June 26, 2009 (emphasis added):

General Motors selected its assembly plant in Orion Township, Mich. and stamping facility in Pontiac, Mich., to build its future small car, which will add to the automaker’s growing portfolio of U.S.-built, highly fuel-efficient cars, including the Chevrolet Cruze and Volt. Today’s announcement will restore approximately 1,400 jobs in total — 1,200 at Orion Assembly and 200 at Pontiac Metal Center, Building # 14….

“This is great news for our members at UAW Local 5960, Oakland County, and the State of Michigan, and shows the world the UAW can compete in the most competitive segment of the automotive industry,” said Cal Rapson, UAW Vice President and Director, UAW-GM Department. “My heart also goes out to our UAW members in Janesville, Wisc., and Spring Hill, Tenn.

Stacy McCain, you know a real journalist, is outraged by this:

What is so profoundly offensive about the unethical and dishonest behavior of Chris Matthews, Joan Walsh and other such Democrat sockpuppets is that they won’t admit who they are and what they’re doing. They are not independent journalists, they’re partisan publicists, yet they expect to be taken seriously as reporters when they can’t even be bothered to do a Google search and find out when a factory closed.

They are a disgrace to the profession to which they claim to belong. Truth matters. Truth is precious and powerful. Liars are a dime a dozen.

Stacy Stacy Stacy, you don’t get it, their objective wasn’t to get it right, the objective was to counter Ryan for one news cycle so when people read their papers & web sites in the Morning they would see the word “lie”. If a CNN says otherwise later, it doesn’t matter as long as it’s in a difference news cycle or at least late.

Not only will less people will see it and by today everyone is talking Clint Eastwood.

Ideally of course as the Evil Blogger Lady says, they would Palinize him, but barring that disrupting the news cycle will do.

In a way it’s much like the proposed plans of the left, do just enough to win the current cycle for the voters and worry about what happens next, a budget is bad for the cycle, don’t have one, need to solidify the Hispanic base and can’t pass the dream act, order it, Gay Democrats won’t give money, reverse yourself, need to burnish your image among Christians reverse yourself on Cardinal Dolan.

The problem with instant gratification is eventually all this spinning and sliding catches up with you, as Glenn put it.

You know, the Democrats’ media base has served two functions. One, of course, has been to misinform the people who don’t pay much attention. It can still do that, though with reduced efficacy. But the other was to demoralize or intimidate the opposition. That part seems to have pretty much fallen by the wayside.

Or to put it another way, in the short term you might get away with it for a news cycle or two, but in the long term your reputation goes the way of Lindsay Lohan on a bender.

Either way what do we make of this move by the MSM and the left on Ryan? I think Robert Stacy McCain had a tweet that really summed it up well:

The fact is Barack Obama is a horrible inexperienced, arrogant pol. He had a good election team that took advantage of the perfect storm of a sudden crisis, a weak opponent and the historic nature to create a false image that the public fell for. Now after four years the con is up and the people who ran it and those in the media who fell for it are worried, and that adds up to the final tweet that says it all…

Matthews obviously doesn’t want any discussion of Obama’s record, and wants to scare Republicans away from it by toxifying those issues as raaaaaaaaaaacist. The aromas of desperation and fear are strong in this clip.

That’s the entire point they can’t run on his record, they have to cry raaaaaaaaacist which means…

Something is happening in this country — something both the Obama campaign and its media cronies know is happening but won’t acknowledge.

What’s happening is on the ground and not yet quantifiable in polling that doesn’t yet have its sea legs. But it’s out there and it’s real and before the media and President Obama are forced to acknowledge it, they’re spending every bit of their dignity and credibility and integrity to kill it.

Hysteria creeps into campaigns when the campaigns know they are losing. When George H. W. Bush saw the election slipping away in 1992, he took to referring to Bill Clinton and Al Gore as Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. The invective went up as his poll numbers went down.

Nice Deb notes this and expects worse:

That’s the reason we can expect even more desperate, hysterical, hyper partisan mudslinging and dirty tricks from Obama and his cronies from now until election day – they can’t lose.

For a year I’ve been telling everyone who would listen to me that this election is going our way, that every single objective metric and the actions of the left back it up. Actions like this:

The other thing that they’re trying to do is that they have a coms group—and this is breaking news you need to know this—they have a coms group that is trying to shut down the EMS communications structure for the city. That’s really happening. They’re trying to shut down the communications structure for the city for law enforcement and emergency medical personnel.

But these occupod types, the intellectual children to Elizabeth Warren, they’ll do the same to the left right?

And no, they’re not going to do the same thing at the DNC, that’s the thing, is because the radicals feel like the average liberal is confused but they have dehumanized completely the conservative. And so they feel they are entitled to take our rights away when they’re not going to do that at the DNC. That’s the difference.

the left media and the entire left establishment who claims they have nothing to do with these anarchists, they will defend them and dirty the name of anybody who exposes them just as they did to me and just as they did to Andrew. They will defend their darlings and attack the character of anyone who holds them accountable and calls them out.

But despite a full year of screaming this out, writing about it here on the blog and saying it on the radio with 50,000 watts to back it up it hasn’t sunk in and the hardest people to convince has not been the left who is doing their best to pretend it isn’t happening but the right who can’t bring themselves to admit they are winning for fear that something anything might happen to blow it.

But now look. You have John Nolte from Breitbart openly saying on one of the most significant sites on the right Obama is losing. You have Erick Erickson from CNN bluntly saying these are signs of panic in his campaign and you have Nice Deb a blogger highly respected throughout the net daring to believe and say what’s been apparent for a while.

One of the only sources of hope for the left has been the right’s unwillingness to say this aloud, if John, Erick and Deb are now willing to do so it means only one thing.

It’s highly doubtful that the ego-driven “messiah” of 2008 would now want to be portrayed as the failed and struggling POTUS running for re-election who can’t even win 2012 on his own.

Besides, what smart, up and coming Democrat would risk going down to defeat with Obama in 2012, after he won with Biden in 2008, only to have a national embarrassment like Joe Biden say, I told you so? Most likely, none.

Yet, at the same time, across the greater right and among Republicans, it appears as though some have a sort of Stockholm syndrome.

The right would do well to re-assess reality around Biden. Obama isn’t “sticking” with Biden, he’s “stuck” with him, a fact that can only help to further demoralize an already nervous Democrat Party. Nationally, plenty of Democrats aren’t only hiding from Obama, their running away from him.

We have been told over and over again that the Obama campaign is doing well in the swing states, that Romney/Ryan has no traction. That the election is Obama’s to win or lose.

If this is true can you explain why at a small bakery in Virgina the Vice president was turned down.

“Crumb and Get It” is a mom and pop store. Literally. Chris and his wife Kelly run the place and need all the business they can get.

McMurray said the Vice President’s entourage got to the point and made its pitch.

“She said they have selected ‘Crumb and Get It” to be his stop on his way to Blacksburg and was wondering if that was ok.”

Here’s the part that might make other business owners crazy.

“This is an opportunity of a lifetime but essentially I said ‘No offense to you or the campaign but I just decline you guys coming in here. At that time she said ‘Are you sure? There’s going to be a lot of press, a lot of activity,’” McMurray said.

Why in the world would a new business owner say “no” to a photo op with the Vice President of the United States?

McMurray said it was President Obama’s recent remarks about small business and who built what.

“Very simply, ‘you didn’t build that’” McMurray said. “Speaking of small businesses and entrepreneurs all across this country and actually last night my wife was up all night. No sleep, she’s worked a full 24 hours.”

Listen any small business would LOVE to have that kind of publicity, but this guy decided that the trip of the sitting VP of the US was not worth it.

Folks, bottom line: this doesn’t happen if your side is winning.

And there are the crowds, have you seen the crowds? Robert Stacy McCain is in Ohio and sees them clearly

While we were at Skyline, our waitress explained that she had not been scheduled to work that day. She had come by the restaurant to check her schedule and the manager — swamped by the influx of patrons after the Ryan rally — asked her to help out.

“I’ve never seen so many Republicans in my life!” the waitress said of the afternoon crowd. I explained to her that it was probably due to Ryan’s endorsement of the “Five Way,” and told her this surge of business was “the start of the Romney-Ryan recovery.”

President Barack Obama has slightly more than 22 days to drop Vice Presidential Joe Biden from the 2012 Democratic presidential ticket, according to lawyers familiar with the party nominating process. That is, Democrats have until September 6 to formally nominate their presidential ticket which will then be qualified for the 50 state ballots.

This involves 2 different questions and they should be addressed independently:

I don’t believe that president Obama will drop Joe Biden or that he will “suddenly” develop a need to leave the ticket but the very fact that this is being discussed seriously shows the weakness of this campaign and the need for a “game changer”.

This is something the left and the democrats can not do without admitting failure and desperation but this whole public conversation is conducive to panic.

But let’s for the sake of argument say the party has decided they need a big roll of the dice and dropping He Biden is it. This begs the 2nd question Would Hillary Clinton take the job? The answer is NO.

Hillary Clinton can count, she knows where this election is going and a defeat on the ticket with Obama will not only stain her with the that failure but will link a Clinton campaign to Obama. She doesn’t want to base her campaign in 2016 to be linked to Obama. She wants to run as the return of the Clinton presidency.

Hillary Clinton knows the problem for the Democrats & the left is not the bottom of the ticket, it’s the top and that’s why Republicans should do this:

However, it cuts out the rest of Romney’s comments, mid-sentence. Here’s the transcript via Action 2 News:

Actually, Paul Ryan and my plan for Medicare, I think, is the same if not identical–it’s probably close to identical. Our plan is for people 55 years of age and older. There’s no change. The only change I’d mention for 55 or older is we’d restore the $817 billion President Obama took out of the Medicare trust fund.

You don’t play this game when you are winning.

Update 2: According to Ed Klein the offer to replace Biden came up two weeks ago, here was Hillary’s answer

“She felt that if she were on the ticket with Obama and he lost, she would be tarred as a loser when she tried to run in 2016,” Klein said. “On the other hand, if she was on the ticket and he won, and he continued his far left-wing socialistic policies, she’d have to defend those policies when she ran in 2016.”

Even Bill couldn’t talk her into it, proving once and for all she is smarter that he is.

But the crowd for the afternoon fundraiser at the Bridgeport Art Center totaled 1,000, an Obama campaign official said – more than the 850-person estimate the campaign offered earlier in the weekend. Tickets for the Gen44 fundraiser, targeted at younger supporters, started at $51, but many were more expensive.

And, to this reporter and several others in the White House press pool, the room seemed plenty full. There was empty space at the back of the large loft space during and immediately after the president’s remarks, but the crowd was densely packed to get close to the stage at the front of the room where Obama spoke.

The problem for Politico and the left is we all remember the crowds for Obama 4 years ago. If you are arguing over half full vs “plenty full” both of them mean something different from “Full” or “Overflowing” Thus Tom Maguire’s quip:

Anne is at the Romney-Ryan rally in Waukesha. She says the crowd is so large they had to move the rally from indoors to outdoors to accommodate all the people.

We’re still trying to confirm the crowd size estimate. (Campaign says 10,000, which is similar to what Anne was told.)

Take a look at that line, you would think it was Chick-Fil-A on a Wednesday.

Stacy McCain was at Manassas and the men from Massachusetts & Wisconsin got more of the same:

How big was the crowd? Huge. Enormous. Gigantic. It was difficult to get an estimate because the audience attending the rally overflowed the pavilion (which has an official capacity of 1,000) and filled the surrounding plaza. Lines to get into the venue circled around several blocks and, when Romney and Ryan arrived, there were still hundreds waiting to get through the metal detectors. Susan Ferrechio of the Washington Examiner, who rode into town on the press bus, shot a photo of the crowd lining the streets of Manassas that prompted the paper’s editorial page editor Mark Tapscott to muse that the polls must be wrong: “How to explain such crowds if Obama is leading in Virginia, one of the key swing states?”

Clearly these two Northerners won this third battle of Bull Run.

This is the difference between a campaign that is winning and a campaign that is losing. Last time around Obama drew huge crowds and McCain didn’t match until the Palin pick. This time around with the Ryan Pick Romney is getting the overflowing crowds while the Obama media tries to argue the difference between a “half full” and “mostly full”

On Tuesday, the Left – armed with the most attractive, eloquent, young, hip and charismatic candidate I have seen with my adult eyes, a candidate shielded by a media so overtly that it can never be such a shield again, who appeared after eight years of an historically unpopular President, in the midst of two undefended wars and at the time of the worst financial crisis since the Depression and whose praises were sung by every movie, television and musical icon without pause or challenge for 20 months… who ran against the oldest nominee in the country’s history, against a campaign rent with internal disarray and determined not to attack in the one area where attack could have succeeded, and who was out-spent no less than seven-to-one in a cycle where not a single debate question was unfavorable to his opponent – that historic victory, that perfect storm of opportunity…

4th Doctor:Then he must be exceptional even I am occasionally wrong about some things

Doctor Who Genesis of the Daleks Pt 1 1975

It’s not personal it’s strictly Business

The Godfather 1972

By the time you read this Paul Ryan will officially be named VP for Mitt Romney today shooting down my prediction of Tim Pawlenty.

I was frankly surprised at the pick, primarily because in several ways Ryan is a bold choice to wit:

Ryan is absolutely hated by the Left and will help energize Obama’s base

The Ryan plan has specifics on what to do about the debt and specifics give an opponent something to attack.

Ryan is not only a creature of Washington but a creature that Symbolizes the GOP house throwing it directly in the face of the left.

At a time when Obama is playing the “war on women” card and appearing with Sandra Fluke Paul Ryan as a Catholic who actually BELIEVES in the faith and doctrines of the church is a glove in the face to Obama and in some degree to the LCWR nuns who have dogged him over the budget.

It is a direct contrast to Democrats, The Ryan Budget vs the Budget that Democrats forgot

Mitt Romney is known for a lot of things, boldness is not one of them, but there is also the pandering side of Romney and Paul Ryan as a darling of conservatives is a pick that panders to the right a bit and if there is one thing we’ve seen from Mitt Romney in the past, he will pander.

But in the end the Ryan pick doesn’t emphasis Romeny the Bold or Romney the Panderer, it actually reflects Romney the fixer/CEO.

Mitt Romney is applying for a job as CEO of a company in trouble. Paul Ryan has delivered a plan to address those troubles, a detailed methodical plan that tackles every tough choice that has to be made.

Furthermore he has defended this plan and these choices for years. Even those who disagree with him, respect him for putting himself out there. When the house tries to push back on various part of the plan Paul Ryan knows chapter and verse, he will be in an excellent position to fight for this stuff.

There is no question in my mind that Romney would have been more comfortable with Pawlenty and the Governor of Minnesota has done everything short of shoeing his wife’s horse to get the job.

However Romney the turn around specialist hired to make the tough calls, can’t look at sentiment, can’t look at loyalty. Such a person looks at a problem, figures out how best to solve it and does so coldly and methodically.

Ryan is the pick of a CEO, as for Gov Pawlenty who was so loyal…

For the left, A Romney pick of Ryan is a gauntlet in their faces. It says he doesn’t buy the polls that he is behind. It means he isn’t afraid of the flack he will get from the MSM. It means that he understands that the GOP house candidates will happily run on the Ryan plan while Democrat after Democrat runs from Obama like the plague. It’s a direct challenge: I’ve shown you my budget now show me yours.

In short Mitt Romney’s pick of Paul Ryan says one thing to every GOP candidate in the field for 2012

Your Tweets — and you know who you are — definitely made a difference. As I explained Thursday, Romney’s people pay attention to their online metrics. Every Tweet to @MittRomney with #GiveUsRyan was a signal that Ryan was the grassroots consensus.

Like this:

One of the things that I have found so frustrating over the last year, in person, on the blog and on the radio show has been the pessimism among some on the right concerning the results of the election.

I’ve pointed time and time again to the various political candidates with skin in the game who are clearly running away from a Toxic Obama, but it hasn’t mattered, some disaster is going to happen, some speech is going to be given, the Spanish Voting machines are going to be fixed or some bit of Republican stupidity is going to turn victory in defeat.

The dirty secret is this is entirely predictable. The Obama Campaign spent millions in July when nobody but pundits and folks like me were paying attention to keep donors and true believers thinking this is a tight race we can win it if only I give another $300

But with under 100 days to go the people who actually have to make decisions based on the future can see the tea leaves and are acting accordingly. No amount of spin or outrage will change that

Lieutenant: …I thought I could catch Little John if he was silly enough to believe your note

The Deputy Sheriff of Nottingham: My signature was on that letter, my word! Are you trying to dishonor me?

The Adventures of Robin Hood: Goodbye Little John 1960

The questions continue to pile up in the whole: “What the *#$&@ are the Obama campaign & allies thinking” business.

Item: Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Jerusalem

With issues already appearing with the administrations support among American Jews the administration finds itself tongue-tied over a simple question

I’m sorry in an election year when you are having trouble with your Jewish base the idea that an administration isn’t willing to say aloud “Jerusalem is the capital of Israel” might be a problem, particularly when your opponent is in Israel saying something like this:

Mitt Romney delivered a blow to the Obama campaign’s frantic efforts to defend the president’s hostile stance toward the Jewish state simply by saying: “It is a deeply moving experience to be in Jerusalem, the capital of Israel.”

Considering that Jews are already outraged over the Olympics deciding the Jewish Athletes murdered in Munich were not a big deal (it’s worth noting that Peace prize winner Obama and the smartest and best-est secretary of state evah weren’t influential enough to change minds on this matter) then again the question arises did they really want to do so. Let’s take you back four years ago:

In 2008, Obama had a big problem in the Democratic primaries. Prospective Jewish voters were being inundated with anonymous emails warning that Obama’s affiliations with Palestinian activists portended disaster for Israel. Locked in a tight contest with Hillary Clinton, the future president couldn’t afford to lose the constituency in the primary—and later in the general election, especially in the swing state of Florida.

Who came to the Rescue? Dennis Ross well-respected within the Jewish community, involved in Oslo

Ross was a powerful asset for the campaign. He went to synagogues in swing states and participated in conference calls to tell Jewish voters that he was supporting Obama over Clinton’s first lady. He continued his work with the campaign during the general election, which Obama won with between 74 and 78 percent of the Jewish vote.

Four years later I’m sure president Obama would like to deploy Ross to once again reassure Jewish voters of his support for Israel, too bad that Ross has decided he’s not going to get involved.

He put his word and his reputation on the line for Barack Obama in 2008, for some reason he isn’t willing to do it again.

I wonder why?

Item: Sure your worth even more money that we lose a year but that makes you a Wimp!

Newsweek has settled on a new line of attack on Mitt Romney:

In 1987, this magazine created a famous hubbub by labeling George H.W. Bush a “wimp” on its cover. “The Wimp Factor.” Huge stir. And not entirely fair—the guy had been an aviator in the war, the big war, the good war, and he was even shot down out over the Pacific, cockpit drenched in smoke and fumes, at an age (20) when in most states he couldn’t even legally drink a beer. In hindsight, Poppy looks like Dirty Harry Callahan compared with Romney, who spent his war (Vietnam) in—ready?—Paris. Where he learned … French.

Ok it’s not a new line of attack on a Republican for Newsweek as the magazine conveniently figures that a quarter century is just the right amount of time for a correction if one can try a new move against Romney.

The big finish is really funny:

At some point, an unexpected event more serious than the Olympics—a scandal, a smear—will put Romney under the interrogation lamp, and he’ll need to rise to the occasion. We’ll see then if he has it in him.

Only a person who paid absolutely no attention to the GOP primaries could say that sentence with a straight face, let alone the last month where the Obama smear machine tried it’s level best to rattle him.

This attack is hilarious, the MSM is making a fuss of it but Romney is laughing it off.

Why? How can it be that Mitt Romney isn’t bothered by this kind of attack? Three reasons:

First of all Mitt Romney knows voters in the US care as much about what Newsweek says as Canadian Officials care about the United Church of Canada says (not at all)

Second of all in an election all about the economy it doesn’t hurt him all that much to be lectured by a magazine that sold for the price an order of fries off the dollar menu that he is not qualified. Just to remind you:

Here is what you can buy for what Newsweek sold for at any of those BK location

Yeah, if I was a Romney Surrogate I’d love the chance to contrast his success to Newsweek’s failure.

But the big reason why Romney isn’t bothers is what the move signifies. It means that Obama’s allies are running out of cards viable cards to play and it’s only July. And it looks like people who risked their reputations in the past to stack the deck, like Dennis Ross are unwilling to do it again. That means only one thing

I thought these desperation tactics would have waited until later in the campaign.

I predict come October the president’s campaign will so desperate and their tactics so outrageous that it will be interesting to see just how far the media and Democrats who hope to remain electable long after Obama is gone will go to defend him.

It sure won’t be boring.

—————————-

DaTechGuy Fundraiser is still in progress, although after a full month I we haven’t managed to hit the half way point I’m still not demoralized as hell. Any help is appreciated. For details click here for the progress check the thermometer to the right and to kick in hit DaTipJar”.

Today Politico, MSNBC, the Washington Post and the Moderate Voice all breathlessly report that while the negative campaign has brought down the popularity of both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, the president leads Mitt by 6 points in the latest NBC/WSJ poll.

The 2008 national exit poll sample, taken when Hopenchange fever was at its zenith, was 39D/32R/29I, or D+7. This one, after three years of Obamanomics dreck, is somehow D+11 if you include leaners and D+12(!) if you don’t. Anyone feel like taking these results seriously?

Bottom line in a poll 46% Democrat and 35% Republican, yet with an 11 point advantage the president only manages a 6 point lead.

One of the topics asked about was Obamacare, according to the internals 40% of the respondents favored it while 44% opposed it.

So in the poll the number of people who supported Obamacare was 13% below the total number of Democrats in the poll, while the number of people who opposed Obamacare was over 25% greater than the number of Republicans polled.

The obvious question is this. Considering that we are in an internet age and the internals of this poll are available why on earth would NBC/WSJ even bother to release a poll so skewed that it can be debunked in about 19 seconds?

The answer lies in the links I lead with. Each of the sites primary audience consists of leftists and none of them mention the D11 split.

This poll has nothing to do with reporting the state of the race, it has everything to do with convincing the left that president Obama is not in the trouble he is in.

For us on the right willing to actually read the internals of this poll and know what it means it says one thing:

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Before a murderer in Colorado decided to change the subject, an incredible shift in the national conversation, one so significant that it threatened to undo millions of dollars of ad buys from the White House, was taking place concerning the president’s remarks in Virginia.

Unfortunately for their efforts: Barack Obama was NOT the first national pol to make this point. Former Obama Administration Elizabeth Warren made it nearly a year ago.

While the national publicity for her race against Scott Brown, a race the Democrats consider their best hope for a Senate Pick up, has died down, her popularity in general remains high with liberals, and the Hollywood fundraising base, A base that gave her speech over 900,000 views.

Given the President’s campaign and money woes I submit and suggest, needing to excite a depressed base, his team made a deliberate decision to appropriate Warren’s words based on their popularity among the far left & media.

That’s the irony, the Obama campaign deliberately did this to themselves but that’s not the final irony…

Elizabeth Warren yesterday came to the defense her former boss President Obama’s controversial statement that businesses’ owners can’t take credit for their success, repeating her own campaign line that, “nobody got rich on their own.”

Warren’s reiteration of her statement — which became an iconic and controversial cornerstone of her campaign — comes as conservatives have leapt on Obama for saying “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

And that’s what’s so funny:

As campaign after campaign runs from Barack Obama as Nancy Pelosi urges candidates to avoid the president re-nomination convention for their electoral survival how does the president react to Elizabeth Warren the one candidate willing to back him up?

This morning we talked about that National Journal article concerning House races as evidence of trouble for Obama. A sharp-eyed reader might note I didn’t cite the Nv-3 race as evidence of Obama’s weakness.

Ah HA! the left might say, You left that district out of your post, is it because there’s evidence in that race, a race named in the party’s Red to Blue program, that contradicts your premise?

Glad you asked.

As the article cited provided no evidence either way lets take a look at the two candidates web sites, their single biggest permanent public platform for clues.

We’ll start with the Incumbent Joe Heck His web site has a very prominent page labeled Issues page the very first item listed is Obamacare:

HEALTH CARE

The Obama health care take over hurts patients and cuts $500 billion from Medicare. Joe Heck is fighting for a better alternative. Joe Heck’s solution supports Nevada’s families by protecting the patient-physician relationship and reducing health care costs. Joe Heck is working to protect Medicare for Nevada’s seniors and preserve it for future generations.

Although he also hits both energy and regulation, both key issues the very first mention in the very first attack is “Obama”.

His “News” page only has four entries but three of those four entries directly hit “Obama” or “Obamacare”

Clearly Dr. Heck is a congressman who has no problem going after President Obama.

Moving forward, we need to implement common-sense solutions that start with securing the border, and crack down on employers trafficking in undocumented immigrants.

and that’s what he says while backing this administrations policy.

On the Supreme Court’s Obamacare ruling he put out a statement saying it’s time “Washington Moved on”. When Congressman Heck voted for repeal he said:

Instead of focusing on getting our economy back on track and getting Nevadans back to work, Joe Heck and House Republicans voted for the 31st time to go back to a time when insurance companies dictated patient care decisions. I’m shocked, but not surprised.

Not a direct endorsement of Obamacare

That’s all interesting but the question remains: “Is there anything on this site that directly speaks to the National race? The answer lies not in what is easily found on his site, but what is not.

Oh BTW I gave the Oceguera campaign a call early this morning. I got a call back from a fellow named Adam Weiss who while a Yankee Fan gave me a bunch of time and was very forthcoming.

I asked him about the single Obama appearance on the web site. He said it was not by design and noted that the candidate had appeared at several Obama office openings (although not with the president himself). I asked if he was planning to go to the convention and he said the candidate would do better talking to voters and focusing on Congressman Heck’s record.

I also asked if his would support the repeal of Obamacare if elected. He said no but demurred on if Mr. Oceguera would have voted for Obamacare saying he is looking at the future not the past. Their focus is Congressman Heck and in a district that has a close split in terms of registration.

None of this suggests his campaign wrong in doing this, in fact If I was Adam I’d be doing the same thing. Focus on my opponent’s record, don’t nationalize the race, emphasis your own strengths.

But as a sign of where things are going for President Obama…be afraid Democrats, be VERY Afraid.

Update: I don’t know what I must have against the National Journal that I can’t tell them from the National Post or National review. Corrected. Thanks to reader J.M. Heinrich for the Catch.

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Yesterday in the National Journal review Josh Kraushaar looked at five congressional races in battle ground states that the GOP is defending. What he saw speaks loudly:

In Colorado’s 6th:

Coffman found his solidly Republican district redrawn into a suburban Denver battleground—and then proceeded to act as if his political fortunes hadn’t changed one bit.

In Florida 18th:

Thanks to redistricting, West moved to a new district that’s slightly more Republican but filled with the type of environmentally-minded moderates that bristle at his confrontational approach. Nonetheless, West has proven to be a national tea party star,

Iowa 3 features a race between two sitting members of congress:

In a sign of how the political winds have shifted, Boswell has distanced himself from the president, most recently siding with Republicans (and 17 Democrats) to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress.

As does Ohio 16

Sutton’s playbook is similar to the Obama campaign’s against Romney—portray the Republican as a corporate type out-of-touch with the middle class, while using his support of the Ryan budget as a cudgel. But Renacci is betting that Sutton’s support for the administration’s policies on energy and health care are bigger vulnerabilities.

Take a look at the examples above, in every case the Republican when faced with a more left leaning district has not compromised or backed away. Meanwhile in Iowa the incumbent Democrat is moving away from the president.

Let’s be blunt: The people with something to lose see a downside to standing with the president and see no downside in opposing him. Why do you think Nancy Pelosi is telling her members to stay the hell away from the Democrat Convention?

So stop listening to a MSM that has no skin in the game and take up the cry

Since he won his seat in 1974, Waxman has never received less than 61 percent of the vote — in fact, his friends say, the last time he was seriously contested was in 1968, when he was elected to the California Assembly. Through the years, Waxman has used his deep well of campaign cash almost exclusively to aid fellow Democrats.

But in an interview, Waxman said he would be directing nearly all his money toward his own reelection this time around.

Waxman is worried? Think about the net effect. How many races in the last five decades got a boost from Waxman’s funds that won’t this time around?

He wasn’t wasting his money. A candidate’s assessment of his chances was discreetly checked and rechecked through other sources…if a report was highly unfavorable, so was Johnson’s response: Noel P. Fox Democratic candidate in Michigan’s Ninth District, told Johnson that he was leading by 1,500 votes, but Johnson knew better (Fox in fact was to lose by 12,000); “None,” he wrote next to Fox’s name.

Robert Caro Lyndon Johnson The Path to Power 1982

The old Avalon Hill gaming company created some of the most amazing military simulation games in history from the Siege of Jerusalem to the Arab Israeli Wars, the greatest of these games was a World War 2 infantry game called Squad Leader.

The game pieces represented individual squads of 3-12 men and single pieces representing the Squad Leader after whom the game was named.

The leader piece and the morale system was the greatest innovation in war-gaming. The entire game mechanics was about keeping the morale of the troops high enough to keep fighting. If you lost your morale and couldn’t rally them, you could not win, PERIOD.

Which brings us to again to Bain and the Obama Campaign.

Yesterday I talked about how the Bain attacks were all about keeping big donors giving, but as any campaign person can tell you while money is vital to a campaign it can’t do everything.

With allies like the Unions and groups like ACORN you can produce astroturf to make a protest but all of those things require either money to pay such people or intimidation to make sure people show. I never forgot meeting a Union Steward who was checking to see which of his members showed up for a rally for Coakley in Worcester and who did not.

A campaign simply can’t survive if they have to pay for each and every individual doing the grunt work you must have Volunteers motivated to do these things. Without the volunteer foot soldiers, willing to knock on doors, willing to hold the signs, willing to do all of the small things a campaign falters.

Volunteers give the single most valuable thing a human has, the one thing he can’t create more or earn more of. The one thing he can never get back TIME.

While there are a few romantic quixotic types out there. It is almost impossible to get people to give that time if they believe there is no chance for victory. Even the true believers once they figure there is no chance, will move on to the next campaign.

And that’s the 2nd reason why the Obama campaign is going all in.

The money problem is huge and may already be insurmountable for the president’s re-election campaign, but if the foot soldiers decide this election is over at best they might end up on a local, state or congressional campaign, at worst, they’ll just go home they might even not vote.

So the Obama campaign will burn money and keep burning it as long as they can, because the moment the stop the truth of these words become clear

The Obama Campaign has unleashed ad after ad contending he was an outsourcer. The cable networks have talked and talked on the subject and the MSM has been divided between those who have said Mitt has to come clean and those who think the attacks are unfair but insist Mitt needs to answer them.

Either way, the MSM consensus is Mitt is playing prevent defense. As usual the MSM has it exactly BACKWARDS!

It isn’t the Mitt Romney team that is playing prevent defense, it is the OBAMA Campaign.

And THAT’s why the Obama campaign is spending their meager war chest and going all in on Bain in the middle of Summer.

The Democrats and their allies in the media understand that if this election becomes about the president’s record, it will be over before the first debate begins. They also understand that while people aren’t paying attention they see in passing the magazine covers, the Newspaper headlines and the various media stories as they surf the channels or see the TV screens that are now impossible to avoid as you go to the bank, the airport or the local watering hole. If those screens are full of the economy the kids will be learning how to say “President Romney” on their 2nd day back to school and the willingness of even the truest believer to open up their pocketbooks for the home stretch will be gone.

They aren’t spending their money in the middle of summer in the hopes of defining Romney to an audience that isn’t paying attention, they are spending the money NOW to keep their poll numbers from collapsing prior to the fall campaign season. This isn’t about getting ahead, it’s about treading water long enough for something ANYTHING to come along and save them.

So the Obama team has shot its wad. Its opponent has more ammo and more money now. Romney hasn’t been mortally wounded. And there isn’t money from Obama to keep up the 4-to-1 spending barrage. In fact without it, Obama might well have fallen behind in the race. So the Obama team pleads for money and turns up the volume of the attacks. (After calling Romney a criminal in July, what’s left for September and October?)

Obama is now committed to a strategy that isn’t working. He’s left to unleash his attack dogs and to pray for a miracle.

That’s why Obama’s campaign is doing what they are and why the media is baiting the Romney campaign in the hope they will bite. Even those media outlets that call out the attacks as the BS they are, are still aiding the overall strategy, keep the focus off of the President record and maintaining the bluff.

Unfortunately for the left and Obama they shall discover what each GOP contender has discovered before them while Romney lacks charisma, he has no shortage of patience and single mindeded courage when it comes to following through on a plan.

Obama’s only hope is to keep things close enough for Romney to make a fatal mistake, an Etch a Sketch moment times 20. It’s not much of a plan but it’s the best chance they have.

The Obama Collapse has been evident for a long time, when it comes, it will be like the Berlin Wall coming down and people who have been doing this a lot longer than me who were talking about the unbeatable Obama re-election will be will talking about how inevitable his fall was.

Think of all the effort, time, money, and resources that Obama has been expending trying to destroy Romney. Yet take a gander at today’s Rasmussen poll and its trendline charts…

There hasn’t been any significant change in the numbers in two months. In fact, if you take away Mitt’s big May 11th bounce, there hasn’t been a significant change in the numbers since the poll began.

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It was easy for all of us to disappear. My house was in my Mother-in-Law’s name. My cars were registered to my wife. My social security card and driver licenses were phonies. I never voted I never paid taxes. My birth certificate and my arrest sheet that’s all you’d ever have to know I was alive.

Good Fellas 1990

One of the things you find a lot in politics is “battlefield preparation”, the attempt to create a meme and then have it become conventional wisdom. A great example of this was the “Billion Dollar Man” business with the president that bluffed a lot of people into thinking Barack Obama would be invincible.

But now that the days of panhandling at weddings are upon us and the bad economic news continues for the Obama campaign a new set of Memes are being prepared. One set is evidenced by the unified wailing and gnashing of teeth by the left over Pennsylvania’s voter ID law.

Hundreds of thousands of potential voters here were left scrambling in the wake of Pennsylvania’s voter ID law — enough to prompt speculation as to whether the law could change the outcome of the election in November.

But one thing is clear: The law is already having a dramatic effect on how the election is being waged.

While supporters argued that it was a simple measure meant to combat voter fraud, figures released this week show that the law may affect more than 750,000 Pennsylvanians who don’t currently possess identification cards issued by the state Department of Transportation.

The breathless declarations of disenfranchisement of a 3/4 of a million voters are based on the number of people who don’t have drivers licenses, however while the left rages against the machine lets look at what is actually needed in PA for ID off the State’s web site:

Acceptable IDs include:

♦ Photo IDs issued by the U.S. Federal Government or the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania:
Pennsylvania driver’s license or

♦ U.S. military ID – active duty and retired military (a military or veteran’s ID must designate an expiration date or designate that the expiration date is indefinite). Military dependents’ ID must contain an expiration date

SEVEN count them SEVEN different forms of ID acceptable that are not drivers licenses, while you’re digesting that let me note in their eagerness to cry foul they leave out one other item of note:

If you do not bring your ID on Election Day, vote with a provisional ballot. Don’t leave without voting!

So if you don’t have your ID on you or if there is a glitch you can vote with a provisional ballot which can be counted if it can be verified that you are who you say you are and eligible to vote. If that is the case why is there such a fuss?

I suspect the reason is this: When November comes around, explanations are going to be required by those donors who gave and the true believers who worked. It’s going to be a lot easier to sell “voter disenfranchisement” to the liberal base than: “Our candidates and ideas stink.”

…he (Union General George McClellan) brought greater forces to Sharpsburg, but he also brought himself

Robert E. Lee

It does not matter what armor or weapons you may have acquired, Turk. You are an idiot. I do not employ idiots.

The Kingpin (to Turk) Daredevil # 186

Yesterday’s answer to Victor Davis Hanson produced a plethora of comments, quite a few of them continuing the pessimism that Hanson expressed, from the “Obama wasn’t on the ticket” business to “they will cheat” business.

Both the left and the right live in a bit of our own bubble, but combined we are in a bigger bubble, the political bubble. We look a the news of he day and say THIS is going to make the difference with the people, or THAT will make the difference but we think that because we are paying attention to the daily political stream while the rest of the public is not.

What the public IS paying attention to every day is their own lives. Unfortunately for Mr. Hope and change and his re-election team, the worst economy since before World War 2 has been the daily reality of those lives since he has been elected.

You can spin this, you can rationalize this, you can give excuses for this, but you can’t pretend this isn’t true.

The Obama campaign can hit Romney on his record in Massachusetts all they want, they can scream “If Obamacare is a tax then Romneycare is a tax” on MSNBC, they can have their surrogates warn of “Weird Mormon and Magic Underwear” and they can pay the Brett Kimberlin & Co’s in the world to make mischief and they can do this with the help and cooperation of the MSM from July till October and it doesn’t MATTER.

None of it changes the fact that the people who don’t pay attention have been dealing with hard times and Barack Obama has been in charge of it.

Mitt Romney doesn’t have to sell the Obama years as a failure, the reality of daily life has done that for him, he simply has to portray himself as a viable and competent alternative and he simply REEKS of that.

Barack Obama has a much harder job. He has to either sell all these ideas

1. Things aren’t so bad OR Yeah things are bad but it’s not my fault

2. You should trust me to do the job even though I haven’t succeeded in doing it yet.

3. Mitt Romney can’t do the job better than me OR You should be scared of Mitt Romney.

Forgetting the fact that nothing at all in Mitt Romney’s persona says “scary” or “incompetent” which makes #3 very hared is the overriding problem:

The OBAMA has to sell the first two items to a public not paying attention before he can even start to sell the third.

Think about it. They have to convince people that their lives are actually better than they have been even though it directly contracts what they, their family and friends have been living every single day.

Here is my suggestion, put away the iPhone or Ipod for a week, walk away from twitter and when you are out in the supermarket line, or at the hardware store or at a local watering hole make conversation, don’t try to persuade them just listen to them talk about their problems and their lives and THEN tell me how Obama has this in the bag. If you do then I believe you will come to the following conclusion:

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Like this:

At PJ media (via Glenn) Victor Davis Hanson talks about a string of conservative defeats and sounds a warning:

None of us know what November brings. We all imagine the race will be far closer than 2008. We worry that eight years of this administration will institutionalize what we saw during the first four years. That said, every person worried about the direction of the country will have to vote, donate time or money, or offer public or private commentary. We are going to see things in September and October that we have not quite seen before in an election, as our modern Borgia pulls out all the stops to do whatever is necessary to win.

Mr. Hanson is a wise man, his books are spectacular and he’s likely a lot smarter than I am, but take a look at his list of items in his well written post:

1. The so-called Obama crash.

2. The Supreme Court.

3. Obamacare.

4. The Arizona decision.

5. Fast and Furious.

6. The Obama crises.

I look at this list and what I notice is none of these conservative disasters are electoral. It sounds like the Gay Marriage crowd who keep telling us the people are for it while they lose election after election.

In fact if you read his whole piece only his first entry “The Obama Crash” is even remotely a political argument and it’s all about polling….

Review Obama’s bad news of the last 90 days: the Scott Walker victory, the Obama gaffes (the private sector is doing “fine”), the Democratic defections (whether senators and representatives bailing from the convention or smackdowns on Bain Capital from Cory Booker, Bill Clinton, etc.), the Holder mess, the circumvention of Congress by de facto amnesty, the non-ending scandals (Solyndra, Fast and Furious, GSA, Secret Service, etc.), the Putin/Merkel put-down, our new Muslim Brotherhood friend and ally running Egypt, the supposed shortfall in campaign donations, etc. Yet this weekend Obama remains up in the polls and ahead in key swing states. If these “bad” weeks have led to his rise in the polls, what might good weeks do?

There is one real problem with this argument, Polls are not elections, 10 days before Scott Brown’s election we heard this:

let’s not pretend that Republican state senator Scott Brown has any chance of pulling off the monumental upset

All the way till November in 2010 the left was still talking about how this rally or that rally was going to rally the left in a narrative that lasted right up until the Sunday of the election.

And in special elections the left has managed only managed wins in safe areas (Ca-36) and in a three-way race with a faux tea party candidate in the mix (ny-26), while the GOP has not only won when they were supposed to (nv-2) but in districts they had no business winning in. (ny-9).

And let me remind Mr. Hanson that the exit polls showed a dead even race in Wisconsin for Scott Walker just a few hours before he cruised to victory.

Yes we have to work hard, yes we can’t slack and yes I do expect these folks to be fight so dirty as to make a mud hole look like a bidet, but perception doesn’t trump reality. Cripes the president just won the biggest victory of his presidency in the supreme court and vulnerable democrats are still running away. It seems to me the words I used last September still ring true:

While the media will do their best to spin it otherwise Democrats in congress and democrats in states who will have to run on a ticket with this president will see this result and ask: “Am I willing to put my political future in Barack Obama’s hands?”

It’s not going to be close.
Update: Woke up to an Instalanche and 17 comments in the pot I’ll get to you all. In addition to suggesting hitting DaTipJar so I can stop using my wife’s car I strongly suggest clicking on the “Ride Right Through Them” link as you’ll see example after example of what I’ve been talking about for a year.

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Via Lady Liberty 1885 we see that the media has figured out that the occupods who were supposed to be so useful for democrats in 2012 have turned out to be rather less useful than expected:

We didn’t really hear about their arraignment where they were charged with 11 counts each with bail at $1.5 million each, now did we? The national media mostly blew it off and have since swept it under the carpet, but the local media added just the right amount of spin

While the media has decided that occupods are no longer useful, this video shows they still have the idiot part down pat:

Wow.

Maybe it’s just me but I think it doesn’t help politically to be the allied with people who want to blow up bridges on the national or the state level ( even if you provided the intellectual foundation of their cause ) so the media is making this a non-story but I can see the GOP ads now with images of President Obama, the MSM and Former Obama Official Elizabeth (Dances with Occupiers) Warren extolling the occupy movement, with the “There is nothing wrong with blowing up a bridge” line thrown in.

She was among the first senators to endorse him over presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton in 2008, doing so just five days after Hillary’s big win in New Hampshire. That was a major vote of confidence in him coming from a key swing-state senator and prominent woman pol; Team Clinton “aggressively sought” her endorsement at the time but McCaskill stuck with Hopenchange. As recently as last October, notes National Journal, she was defiant in standing by her buddy O:

If she thought appearing with Obama would win her votes she would be there. If you don’t believe me will you believe the man in charge of electing democrats?

The man responsible for getting Democrats elected to the Congress this fall has a message for his party’s candidates: Stay away from the Democratic National Convention in September.

Listen, you can show me whatever poll you want, you can have any talking head you want pushing whatever message you want in the media but ACTION speak louder than words, and the Actions of the party says one thing to democrats.

I hate to admit it but, my first thought wasn’t, “Is Aaron and his family OK?” My first thought in my mind was, “Are these people REALLY THIS STUPID?

You have had a letter sent to the Attorney General concerning SWATTING signed by over 80 member of congress. One week ago today I asked Congressman Charlie Bass and Senator Kelly Ayotte about SWATTING at a public forum. The MSM has finally given it a little coverage so there is attention and now not even 24 hours after Walker has won a preliminary injunction these guys SWATT HIM?

I’m sorry this is unbelievably stupid, so mindbogglingly idiotic that I can’t wrap my head around it. Is there really a follower of Brett Kimberlin & Co that is foolish enough to do this?

There is now a reason for each of the conservatives who signed that letter to be called for comment, there is also a reason for every other member of congress who DIDN’T sign it to be called for comment. I am going to be very busy tomorrow.

I’m no longer advising the SWATTER to turn states evidence, there is apparently no point in wasting good advice on such a dunderhead. Assuming the SWATTER isn’t Kimberlin himself or Rauhauser this person has to be a cult follower of the Nth degree.

I suspect anyone with connections to these idiots are doing what Nixon should have done to the tapes, and if they haven’t done it yet you’d better be sure they are going to because as of this moment the idiots are no longer useful.

Walker told Breitbart News that he was home with his wife this evening at approximately 6:00pm when there was a “pretty insistent” knock at his door. Walker answered to find about six police cars in the street and two officers taking positions against the wall with M4 rifles. Since he was aware of the previous swattings of Patrick “Patterico” Frey, Erick Erickson, and Mike Stack, Mr. Walker asked the police if someone had called and claimed he had killed his wife, and police confirmed that that was the case.

In a statement to Breitbart News, Walker said, “This is obviously very upsetting but my wife and I are fine. Whoever did this had the intent to put our lives in danger.”

Update 2: Aaron Walker/Worthing gives his first hand report here and note the reaction of his wife:

My wife came out a bit later and she appeared to be okay and I gave her a hug. She later told me when the officer woke her up, she said, the same phrase, “let me guess, someone called and said my husband shot me…” She says the cop was surprised that she wasn’t surprised.

The Key Line:

This was an act of desperation; this was not the act of people who feel they are winning.

Like this:

In 1863 after Robert E Lee’s defeat and retreat from Pennsylvania The Confederate Government detached James Longstreet and his troops from the Army of Northern Virginia and sent them to reinforce General Braxton Bragg in an attempt to go on the offense in the Western Theatre of operations.

Reincorced, Bragg attacked union general William Rosecrans at Chickamauga. During the 2nd day of the battle Rosecrans, reacting to incorrect information, pulled a unit out of the battle line to plug a nonexistent hole just as a Confederate Attack exploded at that very spot they vacated. The resulting rout was only slowed by the heroic efforts of General George Thomas “The Rock of Chickamauga” whose spirited defense held a good chunk of the Confederate army in check.

Nevertheless the ensuing retreat toward Chattanooga was dogged by Nathan Bedford Forest cavalry. Forrest reporting on the state of the retreating federals suggested to Bragg: “I think we ought to press forward as rapidly as possible”. When Bragg (who at first refused to believe the enemy was retreating) replied that supplies were critically short Forest said: “General Bragg, we can get all the supplies our army needs in Chattanooga.” and continued to urge immediate pursuit to keep the pressure on and take Chattanooga before the enemy could fortify.

Bragg however was not only was slow to follow-up, when he eventually reached Chattanooga he settled down for a siege. “What does he fight battles for?” was Forest’s disgusted reaction.

Eventually U.S. Grant was dispatched to reinforce and take over the Union forces from Rosecrans. Grant after noting some excellent suggestions made by his predecessor wondering “why he had not carried them out”, got to work, first re-establishing a supply line (the cracker line) and then, going on the offensive, drove Bragg and his army off of the high ground he so confidently occupied and sent them reeling back into Georgia.

The Union Army were able to do this because of the inaction and hesitation of Bragg who, after what should have been a decisive victory gave his foes breathing space to rethink and reconsider their plans …

…which brings us to the aftermath of the great GOP victory in Wisconsin.

the people that are behind Walker outside of the state, they don’t ever want to see a Democratic President again. I mean, their mission is to get a supermajority in the Senate, keep the majority in the House, win the White House and change this country to their ideology no matter what any poll says. And so, what is the message to Americans tonight if this is a template on how the rest of the country is gonna go. I believe it’s some pretty damn scary stuff.

O’Donnell hosted the network’s breaking news coverage of the Wisconsin recall election results, along with MSNBC political analyst John Heilemann. O’Donnell called Obama the “big winner” after exit polls indicated that the president fared better among Wisconsin voters than GOP candidate Mitt Romney.

On Tuesday night MSNBC’s hosts spent the entire evening practically heartbroken while the one constant that we have heard from everyone was the effect of money on this race, while people like Barney Frank who were notably silent before are now suddenly saying how foolish it was to get in this fight to begin with.

In other words the left is demoralized, broken and convinced that we can outspend them everywhere.

Moreover the left didn’t lose because the people didn’t see their point due to money, they lost because the people saw their agenda unmasked by their actions:

The left’s problem in Wisconsin wasn’t that the right had too much money. The left’s problem is that the left’s agenda didn’t have enough support from the public. Poll after poll after poll showed that the public didn’t share the left’s estimation of the Walker reforms. Many thought they were a pretty good idea; many others didn’t much like the reforms but didn’t think they were bad enough or important enough to justify a year of turmoil and a recall election.

That is precisely the right attitude. We see the vile progs get cocky after every single election they win, while winners on the right usually try to maintain a stately decorum.

I say: Screw that. We knocked their dicks in the dirt last night, and we ought to act like it. Yes, Walker should keep the attitude low-key. But those of us on the blogs, in the trenches, on the news — we should be rubbing their noses in their own filth and swat them on their asses. Bad proggies, bad.

So don’t let up the pressure. Don’t let up the mocking. We’ve got five months until November, and a lot of hard work to do. And the absolute best thing you, personally, can do, is convince a prog that all is already lost. Convince him that his best course of action is to stay in the basement on election day and spare himself the pain and humiliation of having voted for this SCoaMF a second time.

Keep up the ‘tude. Don’t knuckle under to the progs’ bully-boy tactics. Taunt these losers for being the losers they are. And work your bottom off from now until November, and we’ll get that 57-state sweep.

I know that the Romney campaign is by nature conservative but this is a time to act and act nationally. It’s not just a question of Wisconsin now being in play. We of the GOP need to make OTHER states and districts in play.

It is these freshmen that the left sees as their best opportunity let them know we are going to go all in to keep the where they are.

Second of all we need to contest open seats, in FL-7 backing guys like Mark Oxner against the Hero of the far Left icon Alan Grayson, we need to back Sean Bielat over Joe Kennedy in Ma-4 and keep the pressure on.

We need every congressional and state democrat around the country worrying not how they can help their national ticket, but about holding their own re-election chances, and more importantly we need to make sure their donor base believes that dollars invested in supporting these candidates are quixotic at best and idiocy at worst.

The left has created the narrative of the invincible Republican Money machines, I say chase them and hound them with that narrative so they are more worried about saving their own skin than turning around to fight. Or as I’ve been saying for more than a year…

If instead we like Braxton Bragg give them time to rest and reorganize and perhaps find a new field general while we sit on our high mountain waiting for them to give up we set ourselves up for the same kind of reversal.

It’s now 7:23 a.m. as I type this and I’m watching Morning Joe and I see Chuck Todd making excuses for the democrats and watching Mika go on about the exit polls supporting Obama’s strength in Wisconsin.

Donna Cahill: Who I had some clashes with during the primaries has it exactly right:

Walker won by 8%, but exit polls said 50-50. Why would anyone believe exit poll showing Obama will beat Romney in WI by 9%. #tcot

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) is on his way to victory in the state’s recall election tonight, but looking forward to the fall, the Obama campaign may have something positive to glean from the results.

While the totals have Walker ahead significantly, exit polls suggest he did it with a healthy dose of support from voters who are leaning toward President Obama in the fall.

As the room grew steadily more rowdy, I fell into conversation with Ed Hannan, a lawyer from Greendale, who was glad-handing anyone who walked by, which showed considerable pluck, since one of his arms was in a sling. “I am surprised by the margin,” he said. “I expected large amounts of voter fraud, both in Milwaukee and in Dane County. That has had me concerned. Given the level of participation today, I can tell you, I voted at 7:30 this morning, I was number 78 at 7:15 in the morning. That has never been seen before.

“It means the restoration of integrity in government,” he continued. “It means an understanding of the role of government, the limitations of the role of government, and the return of power to the taxpayers, as opposed to union organizers. That is how important this is. Going forward, what we will then see is more legislation that is going to limit the role of government and, more than that, a repeal of laws. For instance, the Minimum Mark-Up Law, a limitation on the environmental laws. We need to have sunset laws on environmental restrictions and the employment-related laws. This election was never about collective bargaining. It was about legislation that removed the state as the collection agency for union dues.”

There was no point in arguing with the man. There didn’t seem even to be any sport in pointing out that the “restoration of integrity in government” that he saw in the results was on behalf of a guy who took to the podium last night three steps ahead of a sitting grand jury. The distance between what I saw and what Ed Hannan saw was too great. I might as well have been talking to him in Finnish.

Read this entire piece and compare it to the Globe piece I quoted above it’s all their, the same dripping contempt for the voters, the same level of denial and the expectation of entitlement.

This is what the left has become, although I suspect it was what was always there but in their anger and frustration they are unable to keep up the mask.

And this in a nutshell is the Modern left/Democrats, not much difference than the old Richard Russell Democrats where intimidation of a Black political activist and his family to keep him quiet was not only how things were done, but was not something the media talked about.

It also shows why, with respect to my friend Ace, his idea is for a day of silence is horrible!

The goal of the left is to silence us, to keep our voices to break through the media silence on issue after issue. It has been our success at this that has driven them to try to silence us.

So in order to protest the attempt to keep our voices silent, we are going to…do what they want?

Remember this is the same MSM that ignores the largest march in DC every year, it will be no trouble for them to pretend bloggers who challenge their narrative don’t exist. For them that’s the good old days.

I think an even better plan idea would be 100 bloggers calling each of these media outlets, and then perhaps more local papers to see if they are going to cover it, I think calling the NAACP the congressional black caucus and seeking comment would be more effective. I think a headline at Memeorandum that says…

“NAACP silent on attempt to intimidate black political activist through family”

…just might draw a few eyeballs, then perhaps we can contact the British Press and see if THEY will cover it.

Maryland courts have been incredibly lenient with the Kimberlin/Rauhauser axis, but Ali assures me that Texas won’t take too kindly to the purposeful harassment of one of its law-abiding citizens. Ali’s mother has harmed no one, and whoever thought up this sick stunt might find themselves prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law — Texas law.

For some reason his post reminds me of this scene from Casablanca:

Update 2: I can’t stress this enough: All of these tactics are not signs of the strength of the left, it’s a sign of their weakness and desperation These are not things you do when you are winning. That means any counter to them should include this simple piece of advice:

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